Look up UK companies with Companies House

• Anyone who can add or edit a client can use the Companies House lookup. That means Company Owners, Company Admins, and Company Members (if client management is not restricted in company settings).
• The lookup is UK-specific: it activates only when the client’s Country is set to United Kingdom.

Path: Clients → Add client (or open an existing client → Edit)

1. Set Country to United Kingdom. Without a country, registry autocomplete is disabled.
2. Start typing the company name in the Company’s name field. Uku queries Companies House as you type.
3. Pick the matching company from the dropdown. Uku fetches the full company profile and fills the form.
4. Review the auto-filled fields and override anything manually if needed. Click Continue to save the client.

You can also search by registration number (Companies House calls it a “company number”) if the firm has one — type the digits in the company name field and select the result.

For UK companies, Uku pulls the following from Companies House:

• Company name and trading name
• Registration number (company number)
• Registered office address (street, city, postal code)
• Company type (e.g. private limited, LLP)
• Company status (active, dissolved)
• Date of creation
• Filing deadlines (accounts and confirmation statement due dates)
• SIC codes (industry classification)
• Insolvency history flag

For non-UK clients, Uku uses the appropriate national registry instead — Companies House is not used.

• UK only. The Companies House API covers companies registered in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Sole traders not registered as limited companies will not appear.
• Public data. Everything fetched is in the public registry. Uku does not write back to Companies House.
• Active companies first. The search prioritizes active companies. Dissolved companies may still appear in autocomplete but are flagged in the company profile.
• Read-only at lookup time. Once a client is saved, Uku does not re-poll Companies House. If the company changes its registered address or status later, you will need to update the client manually or re-run the lookup.
• Rate limits. The shared Companies House API key is subject to the public rate limit (600 requests in a 5-minute window across all Uku customers). Heavy bulk lookups during one session may be throttled — see Troubleshooting.

Check the Country field on the client form — it must be set to United Kingdom. Without a country, no registry is queried. Also confirm you have at least 3 characters typed; very short queries return no matches.

If a country is set and the company is genuinely registered with Companies House, the issue is usually a temporary connection or rate limit — wait a minute and try again. Companies House public API has occasional outages.

Pick the right entry from the dropdown manually. The autocomplete sorts by relevance, so a more popular match may appear first when several companies share a similar name. Use the registration number to disambiguate when in doubt.

If you already saved the client with the wrong details, open the client → Edit, clear the Company’s name field, retype, and pick the correct match. The form will refresh the registry data.

Companies House occasionally returns 5xx errors or times out. Uku surfaces this as a generic “could not fetch company data” message. Wait a minute and retry. If the autocomplete works but the full profile lookup fails after picking a company, type the registration number directly in the search field — Uku will fetch the profile by number, which uses a different endpoint and often succeeds when the search endpoint is degraded.

Sole traders and unincorporated partnerships are not in Companies House. Add them manually by entering the name, address, and any tax reference (UTR, VAT) you have. The Companies House lookup is for limited companies and LLPs only.