Where the numbers come from

Everything here is public record. The work is in reading it properly — particularly the part Companies House does not expose as data.

The register, whole

Succession Radar holds the whole Companies House register rather than the results of a search. A cohort is cut from it by postcode area and sector, so a company is in the list because of where it is registered and what it does, not because somebody thought to type its town.

Officers, persons with significant control, registered charges, filed accounts and insolvency notices are loaded from the register’s bulk files and kept current from its daily and monthly updates, so a new cohort starts with all of them in place. Where a company is controlled by another company, the chain is followed upwards to the people at the top of it.

Ages, and why they are approximate

The register publishes a director’s or PSC’s month and year of birth. The day is withheld by law, so every age is approximate, and it is shown as a five-year band.

A person who is both a director and a PSC appears on the register twice. Their entries are grouped into one person before anything is counted, so a sole owner is never mistaken for two people of the same age.

Cohorts are cut by the age of the eldest controller, in five-year brackets from 50 upwards, so each company sits in exactly one bracket. A company whose controllers’ ages are not yet known stays visible in every bracket rather than vanishing from all of them.

Shareholdings, read from the filing

The PSC register gives ownership in bands: 25 to 50%, 50 to 75%, and 75% or more. Bands prove less than they appear to — two people each registered at 25–50% may be trustees of the same shares — so where a signal turns on who holds what, the product reads the confirmation statement the company filed and takes the shareholdings from it.

A shareholder list is used only when it can be shown to be complete: the holdings add up to the statement of capital, or the statement declares a full list and every holding on it was read. Anything less, and the record falls back to the PSC bands and says so. Bands are read at their lower edge, so a majority is under-claimed rather than over-claimed.

Statements filed as scans are read by text recognition only where the result is positively sound — the form’s own layout, a single share class, and holdings that reach the stated capital. A doubtful read is discarded rather than used.

Every record says where its answer came from — exact from a filing, or estimated from bands — and an estimate is never shown as a fact.

The score shows its working

Each company is scored on weighted factors, and every factor carries its own line of working, so the score can be checked rather than taken on trust. Missing data lowers the coverage figure beside the score, never the score itself: a small company is not ranked down for filing small-company accounts.

The strongest factor is worded as the register allows and no further: no materially younger active controller has been identified in the public corporate-control graph. The register shows who serves at a company. It knows nothing about family, intentions, or anyone outside it.

Accounts, charges and context

Small and micro companies file no profit and loss account, so what most of the register earns is not public. The product reads what is filed. Net assets year on year are the closest public proxy, scored on the length of a run of growth rather than its size, with a flag where most of it sits in one year — a revaluation looks the same as trading profit on a balance sheet. Net assets are also placed against companies of the same sector and postcode area whose accounts are held, with the number of peers stated, and no percentile is given where there are too few.

Registered charges are classified by what their wording says they secure, and each live charge is shown against the anniversary of its creation. The register publishes no facility terms, so an anniversary is a prompt to ask, never a renewal date.

For shortlisted companies, recent press, Gazette notices and insolvency records are gathered alongside, so the context is in front of you before you write.

What it cannot tell you

• Who wants to sell. It shows likelihood from the register, never intent.
• What a small company earns. Valuations show an asset floor from filed net assets, and an earnings range only once you enter an EBITDA figure yourself.
• Who acts for a company. A registered office shared with an accountancy firm is reported as exactly that, and nothing more.
• Anything about a person beyond the register. Findings attach to companies, never to named individuals.

Dates and sources

Every figure carries the date it was taken from the register. Shareholdings are read again when the register shows a newer confirmation statement, about once a year per company. Company data is Crown copyright, used under the Open Government Licence.