Company Monitoring: How to Get Alerts on Directors, Filings and Changes

To monitor a UK company for changes, the simplest free option is the Companies House "Follow this company" feature, which emails you when that company files accounts or a confirmation statement, or changes its directors or registered office. For watching many companies, spotting patterns, or turning changes into sales or risk signals, you need a more systematic approach. Here is the full range, from free to advanced.

Why monitor companies at all

Change is signal. A director appointment, a new charge, a filed set of accounts or a shift in ownership each tells you something — that a budget has opened, an investment has landed, a risk has appeared, or an opportunity has arrived. Monitoring is how you act on those events while they are fresh, rather than discovering them months later.

Three groups get the most value:

• Sales and BD teams — trigger events mark buying windows.
• Accountants and advisers — client and prospect changes prompt timely outreach.
• Risk, credit and procurement — supplier or customer changes flag exposure.

The free option: Follow this company

Companies House offers a free Follow service. Find a company on the register, open its overview, and click "Follow this company". You will then get email alerts when it files key documents or changes officers or its registered office — and the company is never told you are following it. To stop, click "Unfollow".

It is genuinely useful for a handful of companies you care about. Its limits are scale and intelligence: you follow companies one by one, you only get what that single company files, and there is no filtering, scoring or cross-company pattern detection.

Monitoring at scale

When you need to watch a sector, a region or a whole prospect list, the manual approach breaks down. A monitoring layer on top of the register lets you:

• Watch by criteria, not just by name — for example all new technology companies in Scotland, or director changes across your client base.
• Filter the noise — only the event types that matter to you.
• Spot cross-company patterns — a director appearing across several new companies, or a wave of formations in a sector.
• Route signals into your workflow — so the right person sees the right change in time.

CompaniesIQ is built around this idea of turning the live register into trackable signals; see the search and the signals themes for how events are surfaced by topic.

The events worth watching

Not every filing matters. The high-signal events are:

• Director appointments and resignations — leadership and budget change.
• PSC changes — ownership shifts, often investment. See who owns a company.
• Charges and mortgages — borrowing and capital deployment.
• Accounts and confirmation statements — trading status and health. See how to read filing history.
• New incorporations in your target sector or region — the freshest opportunity of all.

Build a monitoring routine

Whether free or systematic, monitoring works best as a habit: define the companies or criteria you care about, choose the event types that matter, and set a regular rhythm for acting on what comes in. The data is public and the alerts are available — the discipline is in turning them into timely action.