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What do Companies House and ICO records show about a social selling provider?
Social selling provider checks use Companies House filing history, director records, PSC data, ICO registration and ASA rulings to verify claims before you sign.
What to take away
- Social selling provider checks mean verifying a company's legal identity, filing history, directors, PSC data, ICO registration and advertising record before you sign.
- Companies House filing history reveals late accounts, dormant status, name changes and any insolvency, all free to view.
- Director records and people with significant control show who really controls the supplier and whether they have a history of dissolved companies.
- ICO registration and the data protection fee confirm the provider is on the public register and has paid what the law requires.
- ICO enforcement notices and ASA rulings are the fastest way to spot a provider with a record of unlawful marketing.
- A short written checklist turns scattered public records into a defensible procurement decision.
What a buyer can verify about a social selling provider before signing
Most social selling providers are small private companies. That is not a problem in itself. The problem is that buyers sign twelve-month contracts on the strength of a website, a case study and a sales call.
Almost everything you need to check is public. Companies House holds the legal identity, accounts and filing history. The Information Commissioner's Office holds the data protection register. The Advertising Standards Authority publishes every ruling it makes.
None of it costs money. All of it takes an afternoon.
Start with the legal name. A provider trading as one name may be registered as another entirely. Ask for the company number and check it matches the name on the contract, the invoice and the privacy notice on the website.
If those three do not match, stop. A mismatch is either sloppy administration or deliberate distance between the entity that sells and the entity that owes you a refund.
The same logic applies to vendor due diligence for B2B social selling: the point is not to catch anyone out, but to know exactly who you are contracting with.
Why this matters more for social selling than for most services
Social selling providers process personal data at scale. They scrape, export, enrich and message contact lists on your behalf. Under UK GDPR, you are the controller and they are the processor for much of that activity.
A provider that is not registered with the ICO, or has been subject to enforcement action, puts your own compliance at risk. The contract will not save you if the processing was unlawful from the start.
Public records also expose the gap between marketing claims and reality. A provider claiming a ten-person team may file accounts showing two employees. That is worth a question before signature, not after.
Reading Companies House filing history and accounts
Companies House is the register of UK companies. You can search by name or company number and view filing history free of charge, as set out in the official service for getting information about a company.
Red flags in Companies House accounts
- Net assets falling year on year
- Sharp rise in creditors
- Change of accounting reference date
- Dormant accounts filed
- Accounts filed late or not at all
Open the filing history first. It is a chronological list of everything the company has filed: accounts, confirmation statements, changes of directors, changes of name, registered office moves and any insolvency documents.
Read it from the bottom up. The earliest filings tell you when the company was incorporated and what it was originally called. The most recent filings tell you whether it is still trading normally.
What to look for in the accounts
Small companies file abridged or micro-entity accounts. These contain less detail than full accounts, but they still show a balance sheet, and often a small profit and loss summary.
You are not auditing the business. You are looking for signals.
- Net assets falling year on year, which suggests losses are being absorbed by reserves.
- A sharp rise in creditors, which can indicate cash flow strain.
- A change of accounting reference date, which sometimes precedes a late filing.
- Dormant accounts, which mean the company is not trading through that entity at all.
- Accounts filed late, or not at all, which is a compliance failure you can see before you sign.
A single late filing means little. A pattern of late filings across several years suggests administration is not a priority, and your account manager may inherit the same habits.
Confirmation statements and registered office
The confirmation statement is filed at least once a year. It confirms the company's officers, shareholders and registered office. Compare successive statements to see how often the shareholding or directors change.
Frequent changes are not automatically bad. Early-stage agencies restructure. But a company that changes its name every eighteen months is harder to track, and harder to pursue if something goes wrong.
Check the registered office address too. An accountant's address is normal. A virtual office shared with hundreds of companies is common but worth noting. If the registered office is a residential address, treat the provider as a very small operation, whatever the website implies.
If you want a structured way to record all of this, the approach in selecting a B2B social selling supplier puts legal identity first for exactly this reason.
Filing history as evidence of trading
A company incorporated last month with no accounts yet is not necessarily a bad supplier. It may be a new venture from experienced people.
But you cannot verify a track record that does not exist. In that case, ask for the trading history of the individuals involved, and check the companies they previously ran.
Director records and people with significant control
Directors are listed on the public register, with their appointment dates, resignation dates, nationality, month and year of birth, and other current or previous appointments.
The most useful field is previous appointments. Click through to see every other UK company that person has been a director of, and its current status.
A director with several dissolved companies is not automatically unsuitable. Small company failure is common. But a director with several companies dissolved shortly after incorporation, or struck off for failing to file, deserves a direct question.
People with significant control
People with significant control, usually shortened to PSC, are the individuals who ultimately own or control the company. The rules are explained in the official guidance on people with significant control.
A PSC generally holds more than 25 per cent of shares or voting rights, or has the right to appoint or remove a majority of the board. The register is public, and it matters for two reasons.
First, it tells you who is really behind the supplier. If the PSC is a holding company registered overseas, the chain of control may be deliberately opaque.
Second, it tells you who to call when something goes wrong. A provider whose PSC has no other UK presence is harder to hold to account than one with a visible, long-standing owner.
Director disqualification
Disqualified directors are listed by the Insolvency Service, and the restriction usually lasts between two and fifteen years. A disqualified person cannot legally run a company during that period.
If a director of your prospective provider is disqualified, or resigned shortly before a disqualification, that is a serious warning. It is rare, but it is exactly the kind of thing public records exist to surface.
What to record
Write down the legal name, company number, incorporation date, registered office, current directors, PSC and any previous appointments of interest. Keep the notes with the contract. If a dispute arises later, you will have a contemporaneous record of what you checked and when.
ICO registration and the data protection fee
Any UK organisation that processes personal data must pay a data protection fee to the Information Commissioner's Office, unless a narrow exemption applies. The requirement and the current tiers are set out on the ICO page about the data protection fee.
Payment puts the organisation on the public register of fee payers. You can search that register by company name or registration number. It takes a minute.
Social selling providers process personal data constantly. They handle prospect lists, LinkedIn profile data, email addresses and sometimes special category data if they work in health, finance or recruitment. Very few qualify for an exemption.
If the provider is not on the register, ask why. The answer is usually that they believed they were exempt, or that they simply had not got round to it. Neither is reassuring when you are the controller.
What the register entry shows
The entry shows the organisation's name, address, registration number, the date it was registered, the date the current fee was paid, and the tier it falls into. Tiers depend on staff numbers and turnover.
Check that the name and address match the entity you are contracting with. A group company may be registered while the trading subsidiary is not. That is a gap worth closing in the contract.
Registration is not a quality mark
Paying the fee is a legal minimum, not a badge of good practice. A registered provider can still send unlawful marketing, buy scraped lists or ignore subject access requests.
Registration tells you the provider has acknowledged its obligations. It does not tell you it meets them. For that, look at enforcement records and at the provider's own privacy notice.
Read the privacy notice before the proposal
A provider's privacy notice should name the legal entity, explain what it does with prospect data, state retention periods and give a contact for data protection queries. If the notice is a generic template with no company name in it, treat that as a sign of how it will handle your own data.
ICO enforcement notices and ASA rulings as warning signs
The ICO publishes its enforcement action, including fines, reprimands, enforcement notices and prosecutions, on its enforcement action page. It is searchable and updated regularly.
Search the provider's legal name and any trading names. Marketing companies appear there for nuisance calls, unlawful text messages, bought-in data and failures to honour opt-outs.
An enforcement notice is not a historical curiosity. It often comes with ongoing requirements and monitoring. A provider under an ICO notice may be constrained in what it can do for you, or may be months away from a fine.
A reprimand is milder than a fine but still public. It usually means the ICO found a breach and required improvements without a monetary penalty. Two reprimands in three years is a pattern.
ASA rulings as a warning signal
The Advertising Standards Authority publishes every ruling it makes, and the full archive is available on the ASA rulings page. Rulings cover ads across media, including social media posts and influencer content.
Search the provider's name. If it has been the subject of a ruling, read the adjudication in full. The interesting part is not the outcome but the reasoning.
Common findings include unsubstantiated earnings claims, misleading testimonials, and ads that were not obviously identifiable as marketing. For a social selling provider, those are directly relevant to how it will represent your brand.
A single upheld ruling against a small agency can happen to anyone. Repeated rulings, or a ruling about the exact claim the provider is making to you, are a different matter.
Where the CMA and FCA fit
If the provider makes environmental or comparative claims, the Competition and Markets Authority's guidance on unfair commercial practices is relevant. If it sells anything resembling financial promotions, the Financial Conduct Authority's rules may apply, and the provider should be able to explain its approval route.
You do not need to become a regulator. You need to know which regulator has already looked at your supplier.
Cross-checking provider claims against public records
This is where the checks pay off. A provider's website makes claims. Public records either support them or do not.
Five checks on provider claims
- Check incorporation date on Companies House
- Check accounts and confirmation statement for headcount
- Check named clients for public confirmation
- Check ICO register for the trading entity
- Check ASA and ICO enforcement for directors
Work through the claims in writing. For each one, note the source that confirms or contradicts it. If a claim cannot be checked, say so in your notes rather than assuming it is true.
A worked example
Suppose a provider claims to have been established for a decade, to employ a team of fifteen, and to have worked with a named list of clients.
- Check the incorporation date on Companies House. If the company was incorporated four years ago, the decade claim may refer to a predecessor entity or to the founders' experience. Ask which.
- Check the accounts and confirmation statement for employee numbers. Micro-entity accounts rarely state headcount, but the size of the balance sheet and the number of directors give a sense of scale.
- Check the named clients. Some will confirm the relationship publicly. Others will not, which is normal, but a client list with no verifiable names at all is worth questioning.
- Check the ICO register for the trading entity, not just the group.
- Check the ASA archive and ICO enforcement page for both the company and its directors' other companies.
Five checks, none of which requires the provider's permission. Together they turn a sales pitch into a set of verifiable statements.
Claims that cannot be verified
Some claims are inherently unverifiable: culture, responsiveness, the quality of a strategy. Those are judgement calls, and you make them from references and trial work.
Other claims are verifiable and should be. Years trading, legal identity, registration status and regulatory history all fall into that category. If a provider resists giving you the company number, that resistance is itself information.
Keep the evidence
Save screenshots or PDFs of the filings, register entries and rulings you relied on. Companies House records change, and enforcement pages are updated. A dated record of what you saw protects you if the relationship later goes wrong.
If you want a published method for comparing providers on this basis, the approach in reviewing B2B social selling products and agencies starts with the criteria rather than the ranking.
A provider verification checklist from legal identity to compliance
Use this before you sign, and again before you renew. It takes an afternoon for a single provider and less for the second one.
Provider verification checklist
- Legal name and company number match contract
- Companies House filing history reviewed
- Latest accounts read for net assets
- Directors and previous appointments checked
- People with significant control identified
- ICO registration confirmed for trading entity
- ICO enforcement page searched
- ASA rulings archive searched
- Privacy notice checked against UK GDPR
- Claims matched to a public source
- Legal name and company number confirmed and matching the contract, invoice and privacy notice.
- Companies House filing history reviewed for late filings, name changes and insolvency documents.
- Latest accounts read for net assets, creditors and any dormant status.
- Directors and their previous appointments checked for dissolved or struck-off companies.
- People with significant control identified, including any overseas holding company.
- ICO registration confirmed for the trading entity, with the fee current.
- ICO enforcement page searched for the company, its trading names and its directors.
- ASA rulings archive searched for upheld complaints about advertising claims.
- Privacy notice read and checked against your own UK GDPR obligations as controller.
- Claims about years trading, team size and clients matched to a public source or flagged as unverified.
Turning the checklist into a decision
Score each item as confirmed, unclear or failed. A single unclear item is a question for the provider. A failed item in legal identity, ICO registration or enforcement history is a reason to pause the deal.
Record the decision and the evidence behind it. If you later need to justify the choice to a board, a client or an auditor, the record does the work.
Where the contract still matters
Public records tell you who the provider is. The contract tells you what happens when things go wrong. Make sure the contracting entity is the one you checked, that data processing terms are attached, and that termination rights are clear.
For a sense of how a real provider looks once these checks are applied, LinkedIn lead generation service, reviewed shows the format. For a comparison across registered suppliers, three England-registered LinkedIn service providers applies the same lens to several companies.
Review annually
Company status changes. Directors resign. ICO registrations lapse. A provider that passed every check last year may not pass them this year.
Set a calendar reminder before renewal. Repeat the checklist. It is cheaper than discovering the problem mid-campaign.
