If you run a small accountancy practice, you already track Companies House deadlines for your clients. Accounts, confirmation statements, the occasional company that has quietly gone overdue. You probably do it in practice software, a spreadsheet, or a diary, and it mostly works.
Then the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act added a new one. Every director, and every person with significant control, now has to verify their identity with Companies House, and each of them has a date by which it has to be done. For a practice with a couple of hundred company clients, that is hundreds of new deadlines, spread across people rather than companies, arriving over the same twelve months.
So I built something to watch all of it. It is called Filing Radar, and this post is how it works and what I learned about the register while building it.
The new deadline, briefly
From 18 November 2025, new directors and new persons with significant control have had to verify their identity, either through GOV.UK One Login or through an Authorised Corporate Service Provider, often their accountant. Directors who were already in post have a transition period, and their verification is tied to their company’s next confirmation statement. That puts the end of the transition at around November 2026, which is to say: now.
Check gov.uk for the rule as it applies to any particular company, because the details matter. The practical point for a practice is simpler. For the next few months, every confirmation statement on your books comes with one or more people attached who need a verified identity and a personal code linked to their role, and some of those people will not have done it.
What I found in the Companies House API
The first thing I did was test whether any of this is actually visible. It is, and more fully than I expected.
The Companies House Public Data API is free, with a key. For any company you can fetch its profile, its officers, its persons with significant control and its filing history, and those four calls carry almost everything a practice needs:
- The profile has the next accounts and confirmation statement due dates, and an overdue flag for each.
- Every officer carries an
identity_verification_detailsblock, including the date they verified and, crucially, the date by which they must. - Every PSC carries the same, under slightly different field names.
- Filing history shows what has been filed and when.
A few things I learned the hard way, which are worth knowing if you ever go near this API yourself:
- An unverified person has no verified-date field at all. It is missing, not null. Code that checks for null will decide everyone is verified.
- The verification deadline tracks the confirmation statement. A small company with a confirmation statement due in November has its director’s verification due on the same day.
- Verified as a PSC is not the same as verified as a director. I found a company where the same person showed as verified on the PSC register, while their director appointment had no verified date, only a statement due. The likely reading is that the identity check is done but the personal code has not been linked to the director role. It is exactly the sort of half-finished state a practice wants to hear about before the deadline, not after.
- Companies with no PSC return a 404 from the PSC endpoint. That means “none on record”, not an error.
- Officer lists come in pages of 100. Rarely an issue for small companies, but worth knowing.
- The rate limit is 600 requests per five minutes, reported back in the headers of every response.
What Filing Radar does
A practice gives it a list of company numbers. From then on, everything runs on a schedule, all of it built in n8n on a Postgres database:
- Every morning, each tracked company’s profile is checked. Companies House returns an etag with each profile, so a company that has not changed costs almost nothing to check, and one that has gets its new due dates recorded.
- Every Monday, a deeper sync pulls officers, PSCs and recent filings, so appointments, resignations, new PSCs and new filings are spotted within the week.
- A deadline engine sorts every accounts deadline, confirmation statement and identity verification into red, amber or green: red if it is overdue or due within 14 days, amber within 30, green beyond that. One definition, used everywhere, so the email and the dashboard can never disagree.
- An urgent email goes to the practice each morning there is something red, and only then. Each deadline alerts once at amber, once at red and once if it goes overdue, never every day.
- A Monday digest lists everything red and amber, plus what changed on the register that week. If nothing is due, it says so, which is its own kind of useful.
None of it needs the practice to have an API key, install anything, or change how they work. It reads the public register and sends email.
One more design choice worth explaining. A company is stored once, however many practices track it, and officers’ personal details are never mixed with a practice’s own notes. Company data on the register is public. The personal data of officers, and a practice’s client list, are not, and they are kept apart and deleted when a practice leaves.
What it is not
It is not official, and I am careful about that. Filing Radar is a Risdon Automation service and is not affiliated with Companies House. It reads the same public register anyone can search, and it is only as current as that register.
It does not file anything, and it does not verify anyone’s identity. It tells you who needs to, and by when, early enough to do something about it.
And it is not finished. The monitoring, alerts and digest are live. A dashboard for practices is next, and the shape of it will come from the first practices that use it, which is why the beta is free.
Why I think this matters now
The deadlines on accounts and confirmation statements are not new, and most practices have a system for them. What is new is that identity verification attaches deadlines to people, across every company they are involved in, on dates that depend on each company’s own filing cycle. That is precisely the kind of thing a spreadsheet handles badly and a scheduled job handles well.
The timing is also unforgiving. The transition period for existing directors runs out over these months, the confirmation statements keep coming, and a director who has not verified is a problem for the client and a phone call the practice would rather have made a month earlier.
If you run a practice
Two offers, both free:
- A report on the companies registered at your address. Many small companies use their accountant’s office as their registered office, and that is public. Give me your office postcode and I will send you a one-off report of the companies registered there: what is due in the next 90 days, what is overdue, and how many directors still need to verify.
- A place in the beta. Send a list of company numbers and Filing Radar will watch them, with the daily alerts and the Monday digest, while it is being shaped around how practices actually work.
Either way, get in touch or email [email protected].
Filing Radar is a Risdon Automation service and is not affiliated with Companies House. This post describes the identity verification rules as I understand them; check gov.uk for how they apply to a specific company.