About TradeChecker

A plain-English answer to one question: should you trade with this company? Built from the official UK public record, so you can see exactly what a business's own filings say before you invoice them or pay them a penny.

Why it exists

Every year, small businesses lose money to customers who never pay and suppliers who take a deposit and vanish. The warning signs are almost always sitting on the public record months beforehand — overdue accounts, insolvency notices, a director with a trail of failed companies — but that record is scattered across several government registers and written for accountants, not for someone who just needs a quick yes or no. TradeChecker reads those registers for you and turns them into one clear verdict: trade, caution, or avoid.

How the verdict is worked out

There's no black box and no opinion-for-hire. Every report is built by the same transparent steps:

• We look up the company on Companies House and read its status, age, accounts and confirmation-statement filing history, directors, ownership and any charges (secured debt) against it.
• We check The Gazette and the UK insolvency registers for winding-up, administration, liquidation and strike-off notices.
• We run the phoenix check: cross-referencing each director's other company appointments to spot a pattern of repeatedly closing failed businesses. We only ever link a person across companies when their public date of birth confirms it's the same individual.
• We read the company's own filed accounts where available — net assets, cash, what it owes — straight from the balance sheet it submitted.
• Each signal adds or removes points from a 0–100 safety score, and the score maps to the traffic-light verdict. Every report shows the "why this score" breakdown, so you can see exactly what drove it.

Big, long-established companies aren't penalised for things that only signal distress in a small one — the same fact is weighed differently depending on the company, because that's how a human would read it.

Where the data comes from

Everything is built from free, official UK public data published under the Open Government Licence: Companies House, The Gazette, the Insolvency Service and the Register of Disqualified Directors. We don't scrape private sources and we don't guess. If a detail looks wrong, the underlying record is held by those bodies; a correction at source flows through to the report.

What we are not

• We are not a credit reference agency. We don't hold a credit score and we can't see CCJs or bank data — those are owned by the big bureaus and sit behind their paywalls. We read the public record faster and more clearly than you can.
• A verdict is guidance to inform your own decision, not financial or legal advice. The decision to trade, or not, is always yours.

Who runs it

Operator and contact details are published here before the service takes any payment. This is a preview while the site is in testing.

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