Officer status for dissolved and active companies

API Issues
1

Hello Companies House Team,

I am working with the Officers API and wanted to confirm how officer status is handled. When a company is dissolved, do the officers linked to that company automatically become inactive?

For a company that is still active, is it also possible to see inactive officers in its officer list?

2

Summary - the big picture is the API is designed rather like how the Companies House website is laid out - it’s more “follow the links” rather than “zoom in to a particular data field”. And in their design things generally “start from” having a company number.

So the Company Officers endpoint simply records the officer role / status / appointment date / resigned on - if you’ve got the Company number (which you will have / need to reach the Company Officers data) you can just look up the company status if you didn’t already have it, using the Company Profile endpoint.

However there is another path to find / examine officers - the Office Appointments endpoint. To get there (from e.g. search officers) you don’t need a Company Number - so if you go that route the data you get back will contain the Company number - AND helpfully it contains the company status:

            "appointed_to": {
                "company_name": "string",
                "company_number": "string",
                "company_status": "string"
            },

… although beware - that field is marked as “optional” in the data, so it would be a very good idea to parse that (e.g. against the company_status strings in the enum constants) and be prepared for this to not be present / have some odd value. (In that case the next step would be to try to look up the company by number - that should be given…)

I’m not part of Companies House, but a) see my comment on your other post and b) you can investigate this if you like using Advanced Seach (online here):

Search for eg. dissolved companies.

Choose a company and look at the officers

You’ll see some officers not marked as inactive eg. they only have an “appointed on”. That makes sense - Companies House is recording the facts e.g. they didn’t resign from the company before it was dissolved.

BUT if you click on the office entry you’ll see it’s showing the Office Appointments data - and the company status is listed there.