Missing Prefixes in Companies House Document

[joe.goswell]

Hi there,

We noticed the following 4 prefixes below are currently not documented in your Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) Customer Guide.

FE - Further education or sixth form college corporation
OE - Overseas entity
PC - Protected Cell Company
SG - Scottish qualifying partnership

Is this because there is a more recent updated version of this document or is there another specific reason for this?
We are trying to implement some business rules and wanted to find out more information about these 4 specific prefixes, if any documentation is available please could you direct us to this.

Second question is if you have any documentation on Company number suffix? From what I can see this is normally one letter at the end of some company numbers. But keen to understand if there is a list covering all variations e.g. 2 letters etc.

I look forward to hearing back and please let me know if any more information is required my side.

Thanks
Joe

[voracityemail]

Just some old information which already exists in posts to this forum, but since the URI guide I think the following prefixes have appeared in the “Companies House zoo”:

Non-existing company number returns 500

Presumably the “fix” is on the user-side - simply parse anything we want to request from Companies House. For the moment, if it’s not exactly 8 characters - don’t send it! If you get a 404 back, the number didn’t exist. If you want to e.g. regexp these then: a) In the specifications (the XML Gateway Schemas) CH define this as [A-Z0-9]{8,8} - although that is wider than what is found in the data so that is probably “for simplicity” / “future expansion”. There is some (old) official documenta…

As my post from a long time ago notes sometimes some more hints may appear on the XML forum or by looking at the XML schemas for the XML gateway.

All I know is that documentation is … intermittent. Here are some findings on some of those you list from this forum, from the most recent:

Overseas entities:

Timeline for availability of Overseas Entity API?

I’ve been watching the development of the API for data from the Register of Overseas Entities with interest. Is there a timeline for when the API and documentation will be put live?

Register an overseas entity and its beneficial owners

Charitable incorporated organisations:

New company types - enum info missing? Charitable Incorporated Organisation (and Scottish variant)

A couple of company types were added: Charitable Incorporated Organisation Scottish charitable incorporated organisation Examples: CE004165, CE013477, CS000534, CS001896 You can see that these are set up in Beta, but some of the information is missing in the api-enumerations: There are constants for the company types in the ‘constants.yml’ file dev branch of the api-enumerations but not the main branch of api-enumerations. There isn’t an entry in the ‘constants.yml’ file under ‘company_bir…

Further education institutes:

Further Education institutes

Can I check that these upcoming bulk data changes below will also be applied to the API constants/enums? The master branch seems to be a bit neglected at the moment, with all recent changes only being applied to develop. Copy of text received from CH bulk products team: New legislation, The Technical and Further Education Act 2017, is coming into force on 31st January 2019. This will result in insolvency filings for Further Education (FE) institutes. Some, but not all, are registered compani…

Protected cell companies
Perhaps see here?

INTM236500 - Controlled Foreign Companies: Control: Cell companies or similar...

Scottish Qualifying partnerships:

Scottish qualifying partnerships: People with significant control

Companies with letter suffixes
There seems to be nothing on the “why” of these (but note that the Companies House data set is … rather old) but some observations here:

Company Number Format and Suffixed Letters

Hi, Thanks to various sites and official documentation, I had the understanding a UK Company (Registration) Number could be one of the three following formats. 8 numbers, 00000000 1 letter prefix followed by 7 numbers, A0000000 2 letter prefix followed by 6 numbers, AA000000 Recently, we’ve had a company come to us with the format AA00000A, and I’m unable to find documentation covering this single letter suffix format anywhere. Folks are often pointed to the Uniform Resource Identifiers Cus…

[ebrian101]

I compiled this list of prefixes two years ago: Company numbers | CH Guide

It may not be complete as its not official from companies house, but it does have most of the ones you listed.

You’re welcome to add to it if you know of any others.

[voracityemail]

Some good digging there! Is that missing the OE overseas entity type though (also a “special case” of course)?

For bonus perhaps a mapping of the “Enum constants” for the company type with the company numbers (IIRC there are some which you can’t just assign based on company number as the company type gives additional info e.g. public limited vs. private company and the various types of “limited” etc and the various types of ICVC e.g. “icvc-securities”, “icvc-warrant” etc).

[ebrian101]

Yes!

It’s not perfect, but here’s an attempt at determining company type and jurisdiction based on a company number: companies-db/company-number-utils/CompanyNumberClassifier.js at master · mrbrianevans/companies-db · GitHub .
Since the prefix is usually jurisdiction specific as well, you can tell for example if the company is from Northern Ireland or Scotland etc.