How accountants can reach newly incorporated companies

This guide sets out an end-to-end, tool-neutral method for deciding whether — and how — to run selective outreach to newly incorporated companies, from defining who you want to reach through to handing a genuine response into your CRM.

Incorporation is a register event, not a sign that a company needs an accountant. Most companies on any list built from incorporation data will not be a good fit for your practice, and many won't be reachable at all. Whether you can lawfully make contact isn't settled by the fact that Companies House data is public, either — it depends on the channel you use and on whether you're contacting a corporate body or an identifiable individual, and the rules differ for post, email and phone.

The method below breaks the decision into ten stages — define, find, review, research, choose a channel, contact, follow up, suppress, measure and hand off — with who decides and what to record at each one. It uses the standard Companies House fields throughout: company name and number, incorporation date, status, SIC code and registered office address. What each of these means, and doesn't mean, is set out in Companies House data for accountants and isn't repeated here.

The responsibility and decision map

The table sets out all ten stages, each with a stated purpose, who in a small practice decides, what needs to be recorded, where it commonly goes wrong, and what should be handed to the next stage. It's built from a hypothetical four-person practice running the process on an ordinary spreadsheet, with an optional CRM for the hand-off stage — no real practice, company or result is described here.

Working through the ten stages

Each stage from the table is expanded below, with a link to the guide that owns the detail where one exists.

Define

Before looking at a single company, decide which kinds of newly incorporated companies the practice actually wants as clients, and how many it can properly review in a week. This is a decision about capacity and proposition, so it sits with the practice owner or partner, not with whoever happens to run the search.

Record the criteria in writing: company type, sector by SIC code, area, and a realistic weekly review capacity. A hypothetical four-person practice that wants owner-managed trades and small construction contractors as clients, and can review around fifteen companies a week, would set one or two SIC codes and a single city rather than a whole region — broad criteria that outrun review capacity are a common failure at this stage. The written criteria then become the filter used at the find stage.

Building a new-company search profile covers choosing and adjusting these criteria in more detail.

Find

Turn the written criteria into an actual list of companies, using Companies House's own search tools or a repeatable filtered workflow. Whoever runs the search should use the stored criteria rather than their own judgement on the day, so the same search can be repeated the following week.

Record the exact filter set used — SIC code, area, status, incorporation-date window — and the date the search ran, so the result is reproducible. A registered-office address filter is a text match on the address string, not a geographic boundary, so it can miss or over-match; and because a company can carry more than one SIC code, searching a single code at a time can under-count against a broader definition. The raw, unreviewed result list then passes to review.

Finding newly incorporated companies on Companies House walks through the search itself.

Review

Screen the raw list down to companies that actually match the criteria and are worth a closer look, using only what's on the public record. This can be delegated to a team member once the criteria are written down.

Record a keep or reject outcome, and a short reason, for every company on the list — not just the ones kept, since that record is what makes the process auditable and repeatable. The common failure here is treating an "active" status or a self-reported SIC code as proof that a company is trading or that it has any particular need; Companies House records what was filed, not what a company is actually doing. The shortlist, with reasons, passes to research.

Reviewing and shortlisting newly incorporated companies sets out this screening step in more detail.

Research

Look more closely at the shortlisted companies before deciding how, or whether, to approach them — mainly at what the registered office address does and doesn't tell you. This stays with the reviewer, usually as part of the same pass as the review stage.

Record what the registered office looks like — a trading address, a residential address, or one shared with a formation agent or another accountancy practice — and any other filed detail that changes the approach. The common failures run in opposite directions: spending disproportionate time researching a small opportunity, or ruling a company out because its address is shared without checking what that actually means; a shared or provider-style address sometimes just reflects how the company was incorporated. The researched candidate list, with notes, passes to channel choice.

Registered office vs trading address covers what this field can and cannot tell you.

Choose a channel

Match the contact method to what you actually know about the recipient and the message. The reviewer can propose a channel, but the owner should sign off anything beyond post, given the additional restrictions that can apply to electronic messages and calls.

Record which channel was chosen, whether the recipient is being treated as a corporate body or as a named individual, and why. The common failure is assuming that a public register entry settles the legal position on its own — it doesn't. A named director's details are still personal data, and what's permitted depends on the channel and the recipient, not on where the data came from. This guide doesn't set out those rules; GDPR and contacting new companies and the ICO's own guidance on planning direct marketing do, and both should be checked before a channel is chosen, not after. The approved channel and recipient then move forward to contact.

Contact

Send a short, relevant first approach once the channel and recipient are settled. The reviewer usually drafts it; the owner, or whoever signs correspondence, approves it before it goes out.

Record the date sent, the channel used, and which version of the letter or message was sent — useful later if you want to compare how different openings perform. The common failure is a letter that reads like a mail-merge rather than something written for that company, or one that leads with the practice's history instead of what the reader actually needs to know. The sent contact then moves to follow-up tracking.

Writing an introduction letter to a new company director sets out a structure for the letter itself.

Follow up

Decide whether, and when, to follow up on a first contact that got no response. The owner sets the practice's own rule; the reviewer applies it consistently across the list.

Record whether a follow-up was sent, on what date, by what method, and any outcome. The common failure is assuming one interval is correct for every practice and every recipient — no universal window exists for a first approach or a follow-up that suits everyone, and the useful test is what response pattern your own timing produces over several weeks, not a fixed rule borrowed from elsewhere. Any response moves the record to measurement; no response after a follow-up either closes it or moves it to suppression review.

When to contact a new limited company looks at timing in more depth.

Suppress

Honour an objection or opt-out and keep a record that stops it happening again. Whoever receives the objection should record it immediately; the owner audits the list periodically.

Record who objected, when, and through which channel. The common failure is suppressing at the wrong level — for example holding only a company name when the objection came from a named individual — or forgetting to check the list before the next batch goes out. A minimal do-not-contact list, checked before every future find and review cycle, is enough; you don't need to keep more than that.

See GDPR and contacting new companies for what an objection requires of you.

Measure

Know whether the process is worth the time it takes, without pretending to a precision that a small weekly sample can't support. The owner reviews the record periodically — monthly is often enough.

Two or three simple counts, kept alongside the contact log, are usually sufficient to record: how many reviewed companies were actually contacted, how many contacts received any reply, and how many replies led to a further conversation. The common failure is tracking too many measures, or treating a single week's numbers as a verdict rather than watching the trend over several months. What the measures show feeds back into the define stage — narrowing or widening the criteria for the next round.

Hand off

Move a genuine opportunity out of the outreach record and into wherever the practice actually manages prospective clients. This sits with the owner or whoever will take the relationship forward.

A hand-off record should hold enough for a colleague to pick the relationship up cold: the company name and number, every contact so far with its date and channel, any objection or suppression status, why it's being handed off now, and who owns the next action. The common failure is handing off a bare company name with no history, which forces whoever receives it to reconstruct the record from memory or start again. From here, the practice's standard client take-on process applies.

Running the ten stages once tests the method; repeating them on a fixed rhythm is what turns selective outreach into a channel rather than a one-off project. A weekly new-company outreach workflow sets out a short routine built on this same map.

When this is not for you

This method assumes a practice that can actually run it. It isn't a good fit for one with no realistic capacity to review a shortlist every week — an unreviewed export sent straight to contact isn't selective outreach, whatever produced the export. It also doesn't help a practice with no clear proposition for a newly incorporated company: incorporation alone tells you nothing about whether a business needs an accountant, wants one, or is even trading yet, so being an accountancy practice is not, by itself, a reason for someone to reply. And it isn't a route to bulk marketing email sent to individuals who haven't asked for it — the channel and recipient distinctions above apply whatever software makes it easy to send a large number of messages at once, and a practice unwilling to check them before choosing email shouldn't use email as a channel here.

How Launch Register can help

The find and review stages above are the ones a saved search profile speeds up: instead of re-running a search and re-screening a fresh export every week, a profile keeps your criteria in place and narrows each new batch to a smaller review list, with your Lead, Review later or Not suitable decision recorded against each company. Relevance judgement, the channel and legal check, and the letter itself stay with you. Read how Launch Register works for the full profile-to-review workflow, or see the Outreach Playbook for how the later stages connect to your CRM.