How to track verification you didn't carry out

There is a quiet assumption built into a lot of ECCTA planning: that your firm will carry out its clients' verifications, so you will know they are done. In practice you will not perform most of them. Directors verify themselves online, sometimes months before you would have got to them, and they rarely send a note to confirm it. If your records only show what you did, they are blind to everything the client did alone. Reading Companies House's public data fixes that.

Why you can't just rely on verifications you perform

You will not be the route for every verification, so tracking only what you do leaves gaps. Some clients will verify through your firm if you are an ACSP. Many directors will verify themselves through GOV.UK One Login, on their own schedule, without telling you. A few will be verified by another adviser. Unless you are reading Companies House's data, those routes are invisible, and a verified client looks identical to an overdue one on your spreadsheet.

What Companies House's public data actually shows

When a director or PSC completes verification, a verification start date is recorded against that person's appointment in Companies House's public company data. It is the reliable, public indicator that the person has verified, and it is present on the appointment regardless of which route they used to do it. That single property is what makes portfolio monitoring possible: you are reading an official status, not chasing people for confirmation.

Monitoring without becoming an ACSP

You do not need to be an Authorised Corporate Service Provider to monitor verification. ACSP status lets you carry out verifications yourself and take on the duties that come with that role. Monitoring is a different job: it only requires reading Companies House's public company data, which anyone can do. For firms that want oversight of client compliance without taking on ACSP obligations, read-only monitoring is the lighter path. We weigh the two routes in tracking verification across your clients.

Turning the register into a portfolio view

Reading one company's register is easy. Doing it across hundreds of clients, repeatedly, is the real work, because the register changes constantly as people verify. The workflow that scales is the same four steps whether you do it by hand or with a tool. The point of all four is to turn a pile of individual lookups into a single status you can act on.

1. List every appointment, not every company. Pull each director and PSC across the portfolio, because the signal lives on the appointment.
2. Read the verification start date for each. Check whether the appointment carries a verification start date, so you know who is already done.
3. Compare against the deadline. Set each person's status against their window (confirmation statement or birth month) to surface who is overdue versus due soon.
4. Refresh regularly. The register moves daily as people verify, so a one-time read is stale within weeks. Re-read on a schedule and let statuses update themselves.

Frequently asked questions