Launch Register turns selected fields from the public Companies House register into a review workflow for small UK accountancy practices. It checks for new company records, applies the profiles a practice has chosen and explains why a company matched. A person still decides whether the company is relevant and whether any approach is appropriate.
What the method does
The product follows five bounded steps. Each step adds structure, not certainty.
- 01 · Source
Read public company records
Official filed data is the starting point.
- 02 · Prepare
Normalise useful fields
Addresses, postcodes and SIC descriptions are made consistent enough to filter.
- 03 · Match
Apply saved profiles
Supported inclusion and exclusion rules are evaluated together.
- 04 · Review
Show reasons and limits
The practice reviews the evidence and chooses what to do.
- 05 · Hand off
Record or export choices
Selected records can move into the practice's existing process.
The table below is the text equivalent of that lineage and identifies the limitation at the point where it matters.
| Input | What Launch Register does | Where it appears | Important limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Company identity and incorporation | Reads filed name, company number, type, status and incorporation date from Companies House. | Match cards and exports. | Incorporation is a legal registration. It does not prove that a business is trading, active in an economic sense or looking for an accountant. |
| SIC codes | Retains filed codes, adds readable descriptions and compares them with a profile's selected sectors. | Filters and match reasons. | SIC codes are filed classifications. They may be broad, incomplete or no longer describe the company's actual activity. |
| Registered office | Normalises the filed address and derives bounded postcode areas used by the selected location rules. | Filters, review and exports. | A registered office is the company's official address. It is not necessarily its trading or operating location and may belong to an agent. |
| Address indicator | Compares a normalised registered-office address with reference signals derived from official Companies House and HMRC sources, and names the address type the match resolved — accountancy-firm, formation-agent, provider or care-of address. | The address indicator shown in review, the company record and the inbox, and, where chosen, an exclusion. | An address indicator is context, not proof that a named provider acts for the company, that the company already has an accountant or that the registered office is its trading location. |
| Practice profile | Applies the practice's selected location, SIC, company-type and name rules together with its care-of and provider exclusions. | Matched profiles and reasons. | A rule match indicates fit with the saved profile only. It is not a lead score, recommendation, need or statement of buying intent. |
| Recent-volume estimate | Counts how the proposed profile would have matched over the previous 7 and 30 days. | Onboarding estimate. | It is a historical, indicative count—not a forecast or guarantee of future volume. |
| Practice decisions | Keeps review status, notes and contact dates entered by authorised workspace users. | Outreach workspace and selected export. | These are the practice's records, not Companies House facts or independently verified outcomes. |
Source, timing and independence
Companies House is the source of the public-register fields described above. Launch Register checks official records daily and can use official historical data to repair or validate coverage. Those checks are scheduled operations, not a real-time feed or service-level guarantee. A filing must be available from the source and successfully processed before it can appear. Customers choose daily or weekly delivery for ongoing matches.
Launch Register is an independent product. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or an agent of Companies House or another UK government body. Public-sector information is used under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The Companies House developer information describes the public source, while GOV.UK explains the meaning of a registered office address.
Coverage and exclusions
The product is deliberately narrower than “all UK businesses”. It works with supported company records available from Companies House and with the profile rules exposed in the product. It does not establish:
- whether a company has started or stopped trading;
- where its people or operations are physically based;
- whether its filings are complete, current or error-free;
- who founded it, whether an individual has been verified, or whether contact is lawful;
- whether it needs professional services or is likely to respond; or
- due-diligence, fraud-prevention, identity, credit or anti-money-laundering conclusions.
Address evidence is a review signal
Launch Register builds a reference set from relevant public, official-source material, including Companies House authorised-provider information, HMRC-supervised-business information and accountancy-related Companies House records. The comparison is principally an address comparison. It helps a reviewer notice that a registered office may be connected with a professional or company formation provider. It must not be read as confirmation of an engagement, adviser or conflict.
Outputs and safe examples
Exports contain source fields, matching explanations and selected workflow fields. They do not add private contact data. The public download is a deterministic fictional fixture, not a prospect list. It exists so that you can inspect the field structure and limitations without exposing a real company or customer result.
Inspect the fictional CSV and XLSX product-data sample.
Retention and privacy
Company records derived from the public register are retained as shared reference data for as long as the platform operates. Generated digest files are removed after 30 days; an authorised user can regenerate an entitled in-app download from the underlying digest record. Account, workspace, analytics and supplier records have separate purposes and schedules.
See the Privacy Policy for the wider processing explanation. Public availability does not remove data-protection responsibilities from Launch Register or from a practice using an export.
Corrections
If the underlying public record is wrong, use the relevant Companies House process first. GOV.UK explains how public information is handled and how certain personal details can be corrected or protected.
If the Companies House record is right but Launch Register appears to have transformed, matched or displayed it incorrectly, email [email protected]. Include the company number, the affected field and what appears wrong; do not email identity documents or other unnecessary personal information.
Product method and statistics method are different
| This product method | Company Statistics method | |
|---|---|---|
| Reader's question | Why did this record fit my saved profile? | What does a quality-gated aggregate show about a place, sector or period? |
| Level | Company-level results inside an authenticated workspace. | Published aggregate facts with disclosure controls. |
| Inputs | Companies House fields, practice rules and workflow choices. | Versioned eligible observations and a separate publication method. |
| Public boundary | No filtered company list is published. | No page may reveal or reconstruct a paid company-level result. |
Change history
- 14 September 2026 — method version 2026-09-14
- Unified provider, care-of, service and shared registered-office context under one Address indicator vocabulary, with the service-derived values remaining gated.
- 7 September 2026 — method version 2026-09-07
- Initial public product-method record: source-to-output lineage, limitations, retention, correction route and separation from Company Statistics.