About these numbers

What's covered

StatDesk covers the whole UK register — 5,698,176 companies — sorted by primary SIC code into a fixed set of industry sectors (ICB-style). Every company gets a page; the depth of that page depends on what it files:

• Detailed (80,654) — active companies that file full or group accounts (a real profit-and-loss and balance sheet), are at least two years old, have filed recently, and aren't a pure holding company. These are the ones we surface financial detail for.
• Metadata only — everyone else: micro-entity, small, abridged and dormant filers, plus very new or long-dormant companies. We show registry facts (status, officers, PSCs, filing history) but no profit-and-loss figures, because the public filing carries little or no such disclosure to begin with.

Of the Detailed tier, a growing subset has the full financial picture read in — that's the population behind the aggregate figures on the home page and in each sector. It's a sample today, not the full 80,654, so treat the £-totals as indicative of the companies read so far, not the whole register.

How the whole register narrows down to the Detailed tier:

1. Register

   5,698,176

   all UK companies

2. Active

   5,168,399

   currently trading

3. Detail filers

   358,237

   non-micro accounts

4. Mature

   352,096

   ≥3 yrs trading

5. Recent

   347,274

   filed in last 18 mo

6. Routable

   313,511

   no holding-co lock-in

7. Detailed

   80,654

   full / abridged

Coverage by industry:

How reliable are the numbers?

Every figure on StatDesk is sourced from a company's own public filing at Companies House. The page header on each company links back to that filing, so you can always check the underlying document. We continuously sample our records against the original filings and feed corrections back into the pipeline.

A few caveats are worth knowing about:

• A small share of UK accounts filings carry filer-entered placeholder values in the structured data (e.g. cash reported as "£5"). Where we spot these, we prefer the figure on the human-readable filing itself.
• Sign convention on cash-flow lines like dividends paid varies between filers — some tag the magnitude, some tag the direction. We normalise these but the meaning is invariant under sign.
• Taxonomy edge cases (intangibles splits, fixed assets gross vs net, turnover vs revenue) occasionally bucket differently between filers. We follow the filing's own labels where they're unambiguous.

Why "Group / consolidated" appears on some pages

When a company is the holding company of a group, its annual accounts typically report two views:

• Parent-only standalone — the holding company on its own, often with little operating activity (because the business is run through subsidiaries). Can show small or negative net assets.
• Consolidated group — the holding company plus all subsidiaries, which is the operationally relevant view of the business.

Where the filing presents both, we surface the consolidated group view, which is the badge that appears in the page header. The official Companies House filing will still show both — what we're surfacing is the financially meaningful one for risk / valuation / headcount purposes.

By the numbers

The headline aggregates across the 77,949 companies whose accounts we've machine-read so far. A useful sense of scale — but read the caveat below before quoting them.

A closer look at the same 77,949 filers — how busy they are on the register, the median filer's balance sheet, and where capital flows.

Read these as gross totals, not the UK economy. The £-sums add up every filer we've read. Because a group holding company files consolidated accounts that already include its subsidiaries — while those subsidiaries also file their own accounts (see "Group / consolidated" above) — the same turnover, cash and wages can be counted more than once. We don't de-duplicate group structures, so the combined turnover and cash figures sit well above the true once-only total. Medians, counts and the profitability split aren't affected by this. Figures cover each company's latest filed accounts (FY 2020–2026, median 2024), compiled May 2026.

The three company signals

Each company page carries three independent indicators. We deliberately don't fold them into a single score — they answer different questions and pull in different directions, so a combined figure would mean nothing. This mirrors how the established business- data providers present things: one activity signal, one growth signal, one risk signal, never summed.

• Filing Activity (0–100, banded active / steady / quiet / dormant) — how busy the company is on the public record over the trailing 12–24 months: Companies House filing frequency, capital events (share issuances and the like), and officer appointments / resignations. It is not a credit, quality, or valuation rating — a company filing lots of restructuring paperwork with heavy board churn scores high here, and that's the point: it measures visibility and churn, not health.
• Growth — the raw year-on-year change in turnover (or net assets, where turnover isn't filed) and average employees, latest filed period versus the prior one. No score, just the numbers. Flagged "stale" when a more recent set of accounts has been filed but isn't yet reflected in our timeline.
• Risk flags — presence of insolvency history or outstanding charges on the Companies House register. These are flags, not a severity score, and not a default prediction.

Filing Activity's 12/24-month windows are recomputed against the current date, so the score on a page reflects activity as of the last data refresh, not whenever the company was first ingested.

Private-equity ownership (the /pe pages)

The PE ownership pages reconstruct which UK companies a private-equity or growth-capital firm controls. They pair two separate Companies House records, joined on the company number:

• Who controls what — the PSC register. Every UK company declares its Persons with Significant Control. The controller is often another company, so we follow the chain upward (company → holdco → fund) until we reach the top. That gives the control structure. It's rebuilt from the Companies House PSC bulk snapshot.
• The money — annual accounts. Turnover, profit and headcount come from each company's filed accounts (the same iXBRL + PDF extraction behind the rest of the site), attached by company number.
• The firm label is ours, not Companies House's. CH gives the legal entity ("Inflexion Buyout Fund V GP Guernsey Ltd"); the judgement that it belongs to "Inflexion" is a hand-curated registry, checked against external sources. That mapping is the one interpretive layer — everything else is raw CH data.

What to keep in mind when reading these pages:

• Control, not ownership. PSC discloses significant control (≥25% shares/votes, board rights, significant influence) in bands, not exact percentages — so we say "controls", show a banded "PSC control" figure, and never assert a cap table.
• Two views. "All disclosed control" includes minority (≥25%) stakes; "majority control" is the narrower ≥50% / board-control set. We show both because they answer different questions, and the majority view is always a subset of the broader one.
• Figures are a floor. Only a fraction of controlled companies file detailed accounts we can read (often well under 20%), so portfolio totals understate the real picture — each page shows the coverage. Full accounts are counted, never apportioned by stake, and a consolidated parent is never double-counted with its subsidiaries.
• Every holding is chain-verified. The line under each company ("controlled via N hops · every link ≥X%") is the shortest PSC control chain from the firm's vehicles to it; co-control by another tracked firm is flagged inline.
• UK-visible only. Chains that exit to Jersey, Guernsey or other registries terminate there — we can't follow control beyond the UK.

What we do NOT cover

• Multi-year history — the latest filing typically carries the current year + 1 prior. We don't currently walk older filings to backfill 5+ years of trend data per company.
• Full footnote text — we surface short verbatim excerpts of going-concern, related-party, accounting policy changes, and other high-signal notes. The full footnote corpus is not in the structured record.
• Financials from small / micro / filleted accounts — micro-entity and small-company filings (and the "filleted" public copies many small companies file) carry little or no profit-and-loss detail by design, so those companies stay metadata-only for now. Their balance-sheet figures are real data we could surface in a future "lite" tier — it's a coverage gap, not a hard limit.

If a number looks wrong

Click through to the Companies House profile from the page header to see the original filing. If you find a meaningful discrepancy between StatDesk and the original, it's worth knowing about — we continue to validate our records against randomized samples of the source filings, and confirmed corrections feed back into the pipeline.