Companies House checks for funders

Many organisations a funder supports are companies as well as, or instead of, registered charities: charitable companies limited by guarantee, community interest companies (CICs), and trading subsidiaries. For these, Companies House is the register that confirms the corporate facts, and it complements the Charity Commission check rather than replacing it.

What Companies House confirms

The public company record tells you:

• That the company exists and is active, not dissolved or in the process of being struck off.
• Its registered company number and official name.
• Its directors and officers, which you can sanity-check against the people named in the application.
• Whether its accounts and confirmation statement are filed on time or overdue.
• Its company type, which matters: a CIC, for instance, carries an asset lock that funders often care about.

Why it matters for grant decisions

A grant is a transfer of money to a legal entity. Confirming that entity is active, correctly identified, and run by the people you think it is, is basic stewardship. Overdue filings or a strike-off action are signals worth a human's attention before money moves. The check protects the funder and the grantee alike.

Match the entity carefully

The common pitfall is a mismatch: the application names one organisation, but the charity number, company number and legal name do not all line up. Mismatches are worth pausing on. They are sometimes innocent, a trading name, a recent change, and sometimes not. Either way, you want to resolve it before funding, not after.

Combine with charity and other checks

For a charitable company, run both the Charity Commission and Companies House checks and read them together. The charity record covers purposes and regulatory standing; the company record covers corporate status and officers. Neither alone is the full picture. For the charity side, see Charity Commission checks explained, and for the wider approach, UK charity due diligence.

Handle gaps honestly

As with any register, when Companies House cannot be queried, the result should read "unavailable", never a false pass. Honesty about what you could not check is part of good due diligence.

Grantledger runs Companies House checks alongside Charity Commission checks at intake, flags status and officer information, degrades to "unavailable" rather than guessing, and keeps the evidence with the application.