How to Do a Company Turnover Check on UK Businesses
Simone Autiero, 07 December 2023
Finding accurate UK company turnover information is not an easy task, even if you know where to look. People typically use Companies House, the UK’s national business registry, as a tool to check turnover and find other financial data. But it’s time-consuming and fiddly to get hold of the information you need there. Here’s how it usually works:
- First, you need to find the right company. This is tricky in itself. For example, if you search for Monzo in Companies House, it returns 131 different entities—including holding companies and completely irrelevant organisations. It’s not immediately obvious which listing is the one you need.
- Then, on the correct company page, you’ll need to find the most recent financial statement. Monzo has seven pages of different filings, so unless you know exactly what you’re looking for, this isn’t easy to find.
- Next, you’ll need to download the financial statement as a PDF and look through the document manually (you can’t search with Ctrl+F on these document images). Every statement is different, with a different branding and layout. In the case of Monzo, it has 163 pages and it’s scanned directly from paper, making it pretty difficult to read.
- Finally, you need to find the right data itself. Turnover refers to the number of sales in a company’s accounting period, but you may also see it referred to as revenue or sales. You’ll find it somewhere in the company’s profit and loss account data.
Ultimately, performing a company turnover check through Companies House is a real hassle—even if you’re just checking one company.
If you want to compare two different companies, or see their change in turnover over time, you’ll need to go through this process again for each date, or each competitor. Now, imagine you want to perform these turnover checks at scale—for a group of businesses in your region, for instance. It’s a huge commitment of time and resources. And it’s no fun at all.
Fortunately, there’s an alternative way to access company turnover information: Beauhurst. With our verified and up-to-date database of UK businesses, you can have every UK company’s turnover, financial information, and business history at your fingertips. In this guide, we show you just how easy it is to access.
We designed Beauhurst’s business data platforms with the public sector, sales teams, investors, and professional services in mind. Book a demo with us to find out more.
How to check company turnover (and find other company information) with Beauhurst
Beauhurst’s company information database has the largest collection of company information available in the UK. We have data on all of the UK’s companies, both active and inactive, adding up to over 13m companies in total.
We use data from a wide range of sources, including HMRC, international patent databases, the Office for National Statistics, local and national media, and elsewhere. We then stitch that information together into unified, common-sense company profiles—so you don’t have to sift through records of legal entities and holding companies to find the business you need.
In fact, there’s no reason why you should have to do the work to uncover business information yourself. That’s why Beauhurst’s team of 60+ data analysts work with machine learning to ensure that information is accurate, easy to find, comparable, and searchable.
You can find all company details on each business’s dedicated profile. Here, you can easily see information including:
- Financial information, including turnover, credit reports, and the business’s balance sheet
- Business activity and key events, such as funding rounds or changes in company directors
- The industry the business operates in, including their SIC codes and whether they export
- Who works at the company, such as the number of employees, owners, and executives, and the contact details and social media of influential people
- Where the business is located, including their actual operating headquarters, rather than just their registered office address
- And much more. Find out more about the data you can access here.
Our clients use this information to perform due diligence on companies, to find businesses to partner with, to get a picture of their local business ecosystem, and much more.
‘With Beauhurst, we have access to real-time information, with a level of detail that we wouldn’t get anywhere else’, says Amin Vepari, Business Finance and Scaleup Lead at Lancashire County Council, using Beauhurst to identify businesses that are raising equity. ‘I can see the kind of investment they’ve secured so far, what stage in their development they’re at, and really drill down into the specifics, like borough, sector, size of business, and so on.’
If you’re looking for turnover data in particular, below are three ways to find the information you need:
1. Access turnover data straight from company profiles
It’s really easy to perform a company turnover check with Beauhurst. Simply navigate to the profile of the business you’re interested in and you’ll see all the information you need.
You’ll find financial figures for every UK company, including their turnover, operating profit, total liabilities and assets, their credit score, and more. Plus, you’ll have all this information available at a glance from the last four years, so you can see how a company’s turnover has grown and how other key financials have changed.
Every company’s profile and data is standardised, meaning you won’t need to navigate through each company’s branding and design.
2. Search for companies by turnover or another metric
While many people will search for a business directly, in some cases, you may not have a particular company in mind. Instead, you may be searching for any companies that meet your criteria. For instance, maybe you’d instead be looking to compare SMEs—which have a turnover below £50m—or you could be looking for companies with a particular operating profit.
With other platforms, such as the one provided by Companies House, you’d have to look through each company’s financial statements individually to find those that match your needs. But with Beauhurst, you can simply perform a company search by whatever metric you’re interested in:
Open up the Advanced Search feature and search for companies by hundreds of different criteria:
- Financials, including their annual turnover, profits, and more
- Location, such as a region or city, or even down to a specific postcode
- Current stage of evolution (i.e. whether a company is at seed, venture, or growth stage)
- What the company does—for example, search by the industry it works in or any relevant buzzwords, such as 'fintech' or 'AI'
- People, such as the name and contact data of directors, or the number of employees
- Funding received, to hone your search to private companies that have raised above a certain amount
- Significant events, such as whether they’ve spun out of a university
To make your search even more specific, you can also overlap each of these features. For example, if you’re interested in fintech SMEs in South East England that have a female director, that’s a really easy search to make with Beauhurst.
And you can get even more specific with Beauhurst’s Advanced Search. You can search among all UK companies for 30 highly-specific financial criteria, including operating profit, pretax profits, and changes in turnover.
This way, you can get straight to the businesses that match your requirements, without having to sift through them manually or know their company name in advance.
3. Directly compare and arrange companies by turnover
Once you’ve made a search, you can easily compare the matching companies by their turnover. This makes it really straightforward to see which businesses are the best fit for your needs.
For example, let’s take fintech companies in London. With Beauhurst, you can search for those criteria and the Beauhurst database finds 1,500 companies that match. Then, you can simply arrange the results by turnover, or another metric that interests you, such as employee count, EBITDA, or fundraising total:
Finding and comparing company turnover information shouldn’t be a challenge. With Beauhurst, rather than sifting through individual companies’ full accounts, all this information is at your fingertips. This way, you can free up resources—and your team’s time—to focus on more valuable tasks.
Two more ways to find business information with Beauhurst
Beauhurst’s data isn’t just for tracking company turnover. You can use our platforms to access everything you need to know about a business, from key company events to employee information.
Here are two more ways you can use our data:
1. Get a picture of regional business trends
You can use Beauhurst’s company data to access insights into what’s going on in your local area—including company growth rates, high-performing industries, and employment figures.
If you’re a local authority looking for granular information on your regional business ecosystem, or a university building research partnerships, these insights can be invaluable. However, this is typically not easy information to find—unless you have access to the same breadth and granularity of information as we do at Beauhurst.
To access these insights with Beauhurst, simply search for a region and you’ll be served a breakdown of all businesses that are operating there. Let’s take the example of Wales—you can see the most common industries and stages of evolution in the region.
You can break this information down much further, too. For instance, you can choose to see an overview of only those companies above a given turnover, that match a desired employee count, or that have a woman director or recent funding.
‘Beauhurst is the go-to tool if you want to understand your local economy and its path trajectory, to understand who your key strategic firms are, and to develop relationships with them’, says Jim Sims, Head of Economic Development at Basildon Borough Council.
Before using BeauhurstImpact, Basildon Council had struggled to find the data it needed to make a case for funding in the local area. But now, with Beauhurst, they have a better understanding of the performance of the region—and can use that information to get results.
‘We use Beauhurst for a range of different processes, such as securing funding. For example, Beauhurst was instrumental in helping us secure the £1.27m.’
2. Be the first to hear about changes in company information
Businesses grow, get new directors, and update their credit or financial information. But with many tools out there—such as the Companies House service—it’s really difficult to keep track of these changes. For example, you have to check past financial statements to see changes in turnover, or access other company filings to see how personnel has changed.
On the other hand, with Beauhurst’s platforms, it’s easy to stay up to date with the companies that you’re interested in.
All you have to do is make a search using your specific criteria, then click ‘Add to collections’. Now, the dataset included in this search will be saved into the ‘My Collections’ tab—and you’ll receive notifications to let you know when any new data comes in.
You can choose what kind of information you want to be notified about—whether changes in turnover, insolvencies or acquisitions, or staff changes—and we’ll send you alerts however frequently you choose. This way, you’ll never miss a thing, and you can be sure that the information you’re using is as up-to-date as it should be.
‘I wanted a system that would allow me to track changes happening in each company—and that would alert us when changes occurred, so we could use the data to drive relationship strategies,’ says Jim Sims at the Basildon Borough Council again.
‘The Beauhurst platform supports us across the whole cycle of project development, design, and delivery. We use it as a management, analysis, planning, implementation, and control tool.’
Get easy access to UK company turnover information with Beauhurst
Beauhurst’s platforms are the ultimate data source on UK businesses. Whether you want to check a company’s turnover for due diligence purposes, or track businesses in your local area, there’s no easier way to get the information you need. And it’s not just businesses that you can search for. With any of Beauhurst’s platforms, you can access profiles of over 20m businesspeople—plus information on fundraisings, key business activity, and much more.
Book a demo to see how it works for yourself.
