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COMPANY REGISTRATION NUMBER

A Company Registration Number (CRN) is a unique reference assigned by Companies House to a business. These eight characters codes can be used to identify a business

Adding the Company Registration Number (CRN) to each business in your data allows you to easily link to other data sources capturing up to date information on the companies you deal with.

Append Company Registration Numbers to your company data.

All B2B companies have databases/lists of companies they work with, whether they are customers, suppliers or other. Using your internal data you can analyse metrics like customer spend, donations received etc and draw out trends, but you are missing out on so much more.

Once you've added Companies House Registration Numbers (CRN) to all eligible companies in your database, then this unlocks huge potential. There is potential to pull in financial and director information and much more into your databases and easily keep it updated on an ongoing basis.

On an individual basis, you can then find out if your customers are struggling or doing well. Or you can analyse your entire customer base at once, slicing and dicing it. Are certain industries doing better than others, and how does your data compare to that of the UK business universe? We can provide information on the UK business universe over time too.

Company Registration Numbers can be used to link data from various sources.

They key to unlocking extra information is the Companies House Registration Number (CRN). But adding a company CRN to your data isn’t as straight forward as you might think. You will likely hold a trading or shipping address for each company, however, the Companies House database holds the registered address of a company which, in a very large number of cases, is the address of an accountant or registration agent. So matching with precision is tough, there are millions of companies registered with Companies House, many with similar names. Automated matching will only work well if the registered address of a company is the same as the trading address, you can't rely on the results of an automated exercise just trying to find a company registered with the same or similar name.

Our approach to adding Companies House Registration Numbers to company lists:

Automated

First, match at company name and address level to the Companies House database.
Second, match to our internal database of companies: we hold a large database of companies trading addresses and their registration numbers.

Human aided

Third, find the best matching company name in the Companies House database, and manually verify if this is a good match or not – if not, manually research the company and find the registration number.
Fourth, everything that can be matched is checked manually, we’ll try and find the company website and get the registration number from there, or check the address you hold against various other databases - perhaps your address matched that of a directory for the company, we can then use that to link to the correct company.

Automated vs Human Aided and where to draw the line

Where we achieve a match in steps one and two we can automatically append the CRN. Steps one and two can be achieved at low cost. There are three choices from here:

1) Stop and don’t add any further registration numbers – your analytics will be of limited use, but better than nothing.
2) Continue with steps 3 and 4 over time, spreading the cost and slowly improving your analytics.
3) Continue with steps 3 and 4 immediately on the rest of your data.

Costs

Steps 1 & 2 we charge £100+VAT per thousand registration numbers appended. So processing 10,000 business records and achieving 5,000 registration numbers would cost £500+VAT.

Step 3 we charge £225+VAT per thousand records quality checked.

Step 4 we charge £450+VAT per thousand records manually worked on.

The minimum order price for any appending project is £200+VAT.

Summary

Our high quality, exhaustive approach means we can add/append a large percentage of CRNs to your database, the more we add, the better for analytics. With the manual work involved to quality check and manually fill registration numbers, there is a reasonable initial cost, but it is a one-off cost, once you’ve got your database populated getting regular updates to financial/director information is low cost.

With projects like this we can process your full database or a sample, give you success rates and tell you exactly what the final cost would be – without costing you a penny.

On an ongoing monthly or quarterly basis we can then process your new companies data, adding registration numbers and keeping you fully up to date.