The public record, at one address
Read from the public register in 1305 milliseconds, with no permission from anybody and nothing handed over. This is what an accountancy practice's registered office looks like from the outside.
Companies use their accountant's address as their registered office, which is why a book like this exists at all. But 12 different buildings share this postcode, and a residents' management company registered care of a property agent is nobody's accountancy client. Every count below is about what files here.
28901 active companies file at EC2A 4NE, and 500 of them were read, so this is a partial book.
329 of them write 86-90 Paul Street, across 21 different spellings of it. The other 171 are spread over 11 more buildings at the same postcode, so a book here is companies that file at an address and not one firm's client list.
45 are filed under trades where employing somebody is the ordinary shape of the business, which is where the Employers' Liability duty starts. That is a statement about the trades filed, not about any one company's payroll: the register answers that only from a filed set of accounts, one company at a time.
32 are in trades this engine already treats as higher risk, because they involve work at height, hot work, or a specialist product line rather than the standard one.
1 matchs a registered importer or exporter at this postcode by name, which brings goods in transit and product liability into the picture and appears in no accounting ledger as a risk at all.
235 file a SIC code that says nothing about what they do, or none at all. A SIC code is self-selected at incorporation and never audited, so those are not companies doing nothing; they are companies this cannot classify from the register alone.
10 of the rows read are at this postcode and at a building this could not identify, and they are counted here rather than added to the largest one. Putting them somewhere would be a guess that nothing afterwards could see.
None of this needed anybody's permission and none of it says whether any of these businesses is insured. A filed balance sheet has never had a line for insurance in it. What the register gives is who has an exposure; what the ledger gives, once a practice connects one, is what they are doing about it.
Nothing on a crawled book is contacted by Pickle. There is no sender on this deployment and no address for any of these companies in it, because the one address the law now compels a company to file is the one the register does not publish. What a row says is who may contact it and on what footing, and the answer is the practice reading the page or nobody.
Every company here is a body corporate, because Companies House registers nothing else. The people the direct-marketing rules protect are sole traders and ordinary partnerships, who are treated as individuals and need consent nobody has given, and not one of them is on the register or can be. That is the market this product is sold into, and it is reached through an accountant rather than through a postcode.
Nobody is signed in, so 500 of these rows can only carry the general rule. Which of them a practice already acts for is a fact about that practice, and it is answered by signing in as one rather than by anything on the register.
None of this is a list of numbers to ring. A marketing telephone call has to be screened against the Corporate Telephone Preference Service and against whatever the company itself has already said, and neither is answerable from a filed set of accounts. The register publishes no telephone number either, so what is here is a list of companies worth opening.
A crawled row will write you the message and it will not send it, because the sender is you. What comes back is a subject and a body with your practice name in it, the way to stop in it, and nothing in it the register cannot support. It has no address on it, so you address it from your own records and send it from your own mailbox. Nothing on this deployment has ever sent anything to anybody, and a draft is not a step towards that: the message about your own business, which we would sign, is the one thing here that still does not exist.
Everything above came from the 5 requests that returned the whole book with its SIC codes. Employees, fixed assets and net worth are in each company's own filed accounts, one document at a time, and reading one costs three more: the accounts filing history, and two hops for the document, because the register answers a redirect to a signed URL. 500 companies is therefore about 1,500 requests, which one invocation of this worker cannot make, because a Worker is allowed fifty subrequests and a database query counts as one. So it runs as a job, in 42 slices of 12 with a pause between them, and takes about 13 minutes at Companies House's limit of 600 requests every five minutes. It carries on whether or not this page is open.
What it keeps is a company number and the figures its own accounts filed, with the dates they describe. No name, no address, no director and no score, because a company is not a data subject and a director is. It is deleted after 90 days, and crawling this postcode again replaces it rather than adding to it.
The same building is written several ways, because every one of these was typed by a different person. Two spellings are grouped only where some company wrote both halves of the address, which is evidence rather than resemblance. Nothing is merged because it looks similar: merging two buildings that are not one would be silent, and leaving them apart is not.
| As written | Companies | Spellings |
|---|---|---|
| 86-90 Paul Street | 329 | 21 |
| 3rd Floor 86-90 Paul Street | 76 | 6 |
| 3rd Floor, 86-90 Paul Street | 60 | 5 |
| 86-90 Paul Street 3rd Floor | 5 | 2 |
| 86-90 Paul Street Paul Street | 5 | 1 |
| Third Floor, 86-90 Paul Street | 4 | 2 |
| 4th Floor, 86-90 Paul Street | 3 | 1 |
| 86-90 4th Floor, Paul Street | 2 | 1 |
| 86-90 Paul Street 86-90 Paul Street | 2 | 2 |
| 86-90, 3rd Floor Paul Street | 2 | 2 |
| 86-90 3rd Floor Paul Street | 1 | 1 |
| 86/90. 4th Floor Paul Street, London | 1 | 1 |
At this postcode, at a building this could not identify3/F 86 - 90 Paul Street / 89-90 Paul Street / 86-90 Hoxton Mix Paul Street / 3rd Floor 86-90 Paul St |
10 | – |
From the SIC codes the register returns with the search, so this needed no extra request. A SIC code is chosen once on the incorporation form and never audited, which is why 235 of them say nothing at all and are not in this table.
| Filed as | Companies | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Software developer | 113 | Nothing the taxonomy flags |
| Consultant | 50 | Nothing the taxonomy flags |
| Designer | 27 | Nothing the taxonomy flags |
| Builder | 21 | Work at height, hot work or a specialist line |
| Architect | 8 | Nothing the taxonomy flags |
| Cleaner | 8 | A trade where employing somebody is ordinary |
| Musician | 6 | Nothing the taxonomy flags |
| Project manager | 6 | Nothing the taxonomy flags |
| Artist / maker | 5 | Nothing the taxonomy flags |
| Haulier / fleet | 4 | Work at height, hot work or a specialist line |
| Accountant / bookkeeper | 3 | Nothing the taxonomy flags |
| Personal trainer | 3 | A trade where employing somebody is ordinary |
The register can say who has an exposure. It cannot say who lacks cover: a filed balance sheet has never had a line for insurance in it, so an absence here is an absence of a field and not evidence about anybody.
It also cannot tell you who owes the Employers' Liability duty. The exemption for a single employee who owns half the shares is answered by the register of people with significant control, and a crawl keeps nothing about a person, so that register is read live on the audit of whichever company is opened and is never written down.
And it cannot tell you whether any of these has already said it does not want to hear from anybody. There is no address here to write to, no telephone number, and nothing that reads the Corporate Telephone Preference Service or a company's own objection, all of which sit outside the register. A mark against a row is the day you said you had called and nothing else: there is no note beside it, on purpose, because a note is where what somebody said on the telephone would end up.
And it cannot send the message it writes you, which is not a missing button. The sender of a message to a company that is not your customer is you, so what this produces is a draft with your name on it and no address on it, and it is not kept anywhere afterwards: reloading the page composes it again from the same figures. The other message, the one about a business on an account that we would sign and send, is still the one thing here that does not exist.