Legal and accounting data guide
Accountancy practices are visible in the register in a way no other sector is, because thousands of companies use their address. That is either a feature or a trap depending on what you are counting.
Legal and accounting sits in a single SIC division, 69, and splits three ways: 69109 other legal activities, 69201 accounting and auditing, and 69202 bookkeeping.
The interesting thing about this sector is not the companies in it. It is what they do to everyone else's records.
The registered office problem, and what it is good for
An enormous number of UK companies use their accountant's office as their registered address. It is convenient, it keeps the director's home address off the public record, and it means post goes where it needs to go.
The consequence is that registered office data is unreliable for locating a business and unusually revealing about accountancy practices.
If several hundred unrelated companies all share one registered address, that address is almost certainly a practice, and the count is a rough read on how many clients it serves. You can see which practices are growing by watching that number move. You can see which sectors a practice concentrates in by looking at the SIC codes of the companies at its address.
None of that is published anywhere. It falls out of the register as a side effect.
The same fact is why you should never treat a registered office as a trading address for any other analysis.
What the register holds
The standard record for every firm: name, number, status, incorporation date, registered office, officers, people with significant control, filing history.
What the register does not hold
This sector has a bigger gap than most.
- Regulation. Solicitors are on the SRA register, accountants with ICAEW, ACCA or similar, auditors on the RPB registers. None of that is in Companies House, and it is the thing that actually matters about a firm.
- Partnerships. Many practices are traditional partnerships, which are not companies and therefore are not on the register at all. LLPs are, but they are a different record type.
- Fee income, client numbers, headcount
- Specialism. A 69109 could be conveyancing or commercial litigation.
If you are qualifying a firm rather than finding one, the professional registers are the source and this is the supporting record.
What people in the sector actually do with it
- Build a list of practices in an area, by SIC code and postcode
- Find newly incorporated practices, which are buying software and insurance for the first time
- Check a firm's age, status and officers before referring work
- Identify practices by registered-address clustering, and read their approximate client base
- Track dissolutions and consolidation, which in accountancy has been steady
Where to start
The legal and accounting sector view breaks division 69 down by code, with formations and dissolutions.
If you need a cut that does not exist, tell us what it is.
See the data for legal & accounting
The register broken down by sector, and the datasets that apply to it.