Buying an accountancy or audit practice starts with a list, and most lists are rubbish. A Companies House industry-code filter gives you breadth and nothing else — tens of thousands of companies, no idea which are real practices, no idea of size, no idea whether the owner is sixty-four or thirty-four.
So the engine layers its sources. Companies House gives the breadth: every active firm under the accountancy, bookkeeping and tax codes that has actually filed accounts. The statutory audit register gives the one fact that cannot be self-declared — who is registered to audit. Officer records give ages and succession signals; filed accounts give headcount. Each layer fills what the last one could not.
The rule that matters most is what the engine refuses to do. If a phone number, email or website can't be confirmed from a primary source, the field stays empty and the firm stays where it is. A blank beats a wrong number, because a wrong number wastes the one approach you get.
- A weekly sweep of the statutory audit register, by region, giving a list of firms that verifiably do the work
- A Companies House scan used for signals rather than identification — partner ages, succession risk, filing patterns, incorporation dates
- Fit scoring across fee income, partner count, succession signals, audit capability and distance from an existing office
- Contact verification against each firm's own site or the register, with unconfirmed fields deliberately left blank
- A six-stage pipeline from identified through to under offer, with the count at each stage visible at all times
- Two programmes on one engine, filtered separately, so an accountancy search and an audit search never contaminate each other
- Outreach sequencing off the back of the verified list, so the approach happens while the research is still current
Breadth from Companies House, facts from the register
An industry-code filter on Companies House produces tens of thousands of companies, many of which aren't practices, because the code is self-declared.
So it is used for what it is: breadth. The statutory audit register — where registration is a fact checked by a regulator — supplies the one thing a code can't, and the two are merged firm by firm. A buyer sees one universe, not two lists.
Companies House for signals, not identity
Officer ages, filing history, incorporation dates, appointment patterns.
That's succession intelligence — the strongest predictor of whether a partner might be open to a conversation. Used for scoring rather than for deciding who exists, it's extremely useful.
A blank beats a wrong number
Contact enrichment tools will happily return a plausible email for any firm. Most of the industry treats that as a feature.
Here it's banned. If a phone number, email or website can't be confirmed against a primary source, the field stays empty and the firm stays at Identified. You get one approach to a practice owner; spending it on a wrong number is worse than not approaching at all.
Two programmes, one engine, kept apart
An accountancy search and an audit-firm search have different criteria and different owners.
They run on the same engine with separate filters and separate pipelines, so neither contaminates the other — but improvements to sourcing, scoring or verification benefit both without being built twice.