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How to check a company claim in ten minutes

A registration number is easy to quote and easy to check. Here is what it proves, what it does not, and how anyone can verify it without specialist access.

Garang Mayom Malek · 1 September 2026 · 3 minute read

People write about companies without opening the register. It takes a few minutes, it is free, and it settles most of what is usually argued about. This is how I would do it, and I will use my own companies as the worked example so nobody has to take my word for anything.

Start with the number, not the name. Company names repeat, are reused after a company closes, and are often similar enough to confuse. The registration number does not repeat. In the United Kingdom, the public register at Companies House lets anybody search by that number and see the same record a bank or a counterparty would see.

Capital Pay Ltd is registered under number 16137715 and was incorporated on 16 December 2024. Capital Pay Software Solutions Ltd is registered under number 16160215 and was incorporated on 2 January 2025. Both records show the company as active. I am recorded as a director of both. Those sentences are checkable in about a minute each, and if any of them stops being true the register will say so before I do.

Now the more useful half, which is what the register does not tell you.

It does not tell you that a company trades, or how much. Incorporation is a filing, not an achievement. A company can be registered on Monday and do nothing for a year.

It does not tell you that a company is the one you were reading about. This is the trap most often fallen into. Two companies can share a trading name, sit at the same address and be entirely separate legal entities. The only way to tie a name to a number is to find the tie stated somewhere that the company itself publishes. In our case the CapitalPay United Kingdom terms of use say plainly that the supplier is Capital Pay Software Solutions Ltd, registered under number 16160215. That sentence, on the company's own site, is what connects the trading name to that particular number. The other number does not appear there, and it would be wrong to assume it applies.

It does not tell you who owns the company in the ordinary sense. A director is a person recorded as running the company. Ownership is a separate question with a separate filing, and the two are often confused in writing.

It does not tell you anything about a different company in a different country. A description written about an entity in one jurisdiction, at one point in time, is a fact about that entity at that time. It is not a statement about a company registered somewhere else years later, however similar the trading name.

That last point is worth spelling out, because it is the most common error I see. A historical description of a business relationship, published in a document with a date on it, tells you what the author understood when they wrote it. It does not establish who owns a company incorporated afterwards. If the two are being treated as the same claim, somebody has skipped a step.

So the ten minute version is this. Take the number. Open the register. Read the incorporation date, the status and the officers. Then go to the company's own site and find where it names its legal entity, usually in the terms or the privacy notice. If the name and the number match, you have tied the trading name to the record. If they do not, you have found something worth asking about.

I said in a recent interview that I would rather point a serious customer, journalist or reviewer at the filings than at a press release, and I meant it as a practical preference rather than a virtue. Filings are dated, they are public, and they do not change to suit whoever is describing them. A press release is a company talking about itself, which is useful for understanding what a company intends and useless for establishing what it has done.

If anything on this site does not match the register, tell me and point at the document. It will be checked and corrected, and the correction will carry a date.

Filed under Public records.