Can They Pay?

The patterns creditors check that hold for the company, each with its evidence, rule, source and date; checked lists every rule looked at. Each pattern is a fact from a public record that creditors look for because such patterns can come before a company fails to pay. Each is shown only when it holds, with its source and date. They are not a score, a credit rating or a prediction about this company: many companies show one or more and carry on trading and paying. Figures are the company's own filings, shown as filed.

The rules:

• Net assets and cash at bank were both lower at the latest year end than a year earlier, each by 10% or more (or net assets fell further below zero). Figures that fail CompanyStack's plausibility checks are not used.
• Creditors due within a year rose by 10% or more between the last two year ends, and as a share of current assets they went up by 10 percentage points or more.
• The register's due date for the accounts or the confirmation statement had passed when we last held the register, and it recorded nothing newer.
• A later year's accounts restated an earlier year's net assets, profit, turnover, cash or current assets downward, or its creditors due within a year upward, by 5% or more (and at least £1,000), for a year end in the last 4 years.
• A current person with significant control is, or was, a PSC of 2 or more other companies now in liquidation, administration or insolvency proceedings, or facing strike-off, and those make up 25% or more of their other companies. People are matched across companies on the same name and month and year of birth: a possible match only, which may be a different person. Dissolved companies are not counted as failures (many close voluntarily).
• At least 10 companies are registered at the registered office's first line and postcode, and 40% or more of them are dissolved, facing strike-off or in liquidation (across the register as a whole, about 15% are, in October 2026). It says where the company is registered, not how it trades.
• In the last 12 months, two or more people with significant control ceased, or at least one ceased and another was notified (control changed hands). Notifications within 30 days of incorporation are not counted.
• The Gazette published a petition to wind the company up in the last 12 months, in a notice giving its company number, and no dismissal of it since.
• Companies House removed the company's registered office and put it at the registrar's default address (a PO Box in Cardiff, Edinburgh or Belfast): the company has no registered office of its own on the register.
• The registered office moved in the last 12 months (Companies House filing history) to an address whose first line and postcode the Gazette notices appointing liquidators or administrators gave as the registered office of 5 or more other companies since October 2021, and at least two-thirds of the companies registered there are in liquidation or administration. Such an address is typically an insolvency practitioner's office: practitioners usually move a company's registered office to their own on appointment, and sometimes before. The move is a fact from the filing history; it says nothing about the company's intentions.

accounts_quality holds the accounts-quality flags while they are switched on: restatements, repeated changes of accounting reference date, accounts type switches, dormant then trading, and a parent's section 479A guarantee (favourable). A company whose latest accounts were filed as dormant is not checked for the trading-figure patterns (dormant_note says so). Dissolved and closed companies get applies: false.

API Starter and above. With the accounts-quality flags on, one Companies House filing-history request per company, cached for 6 hours.