Data sources

Every field Rotuli returns comes from an official UK public source. This page lists each source, its licence and required attribution, and how fresh our copy is. The API's sources_checked and sources_failed fields tell you exactly which sources were attempted and which failed; successful sources are the attempted set minus failures. Control graphs additionally report discovery and per-company assessment coverage.

Active sources

Companies House

Company profiles, officers and directors, persons with significant control, registered charges (security interests over company assets), and company search. Fetched live from the Companies House API and cached for up to 4 hours.

Control-graph discovery uses a published daily Companies House PSC snapshot when an index is available. It pins one snapshot for the request; company-status and insolvency assessments use live or cached API data separately. Corporate links are joined through resolvable registry identifiers, never names or similar-looking numbers.

Registered charges cover a company's borrowing history: both outstanding and satisfied charges are returned, along with counts and whether a charge is a floating charge over the whole undertaking. Satisfied charges are kept rather than filtered out — they remain relevant to due diligence.

Every active director is additionally checked against Companies House's register of disqualified directors. Each checked director carries an explicit clear, disqualified, or unknown verdict, matched only on Companies House-asserted identifiers — never a name-based guess, so unknown is never reported as clear. These verdicts are retrieved from Companies House and cached alongside the officer data for up to 4 hours.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

How Rotuli handles Companies House data

The Insolvency Service

Corporate insolvency case records, retrieved via Companies House and cached for up to 4 hours.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

How Rotuli handles Insolvency Service data

HM Land Registry — UK Companies that Own Property (CCOD)

Corporate ownership of registered land titles in England and Wales, including tenure and price paid where HM Land Registry recorded one. The dataset is refreshed monthly, when HM Land Registry publishes it. Scotland and Northern Ireland have separate registries that Rotuli does not currently cover.

Information produced by HM Land Registry © Crown copyright and database right 2026. Licensed for value-added use; this data must not be redistributed as a standalone dataset.

How Rotuli handles HM Land Registry CCOD data

Freshness and caching

Each response slab carries its own {source}_fetched_at timestamp so you can inspect per-source staleness, and the entity endpoint’s ?fresh=true requests a re-fetch. The control-graph endpoint has no fresh bypass.

In a graph, snapshot.as_of identifies the discovery vintage; snapshot.published_at records publication of the selected index. Node observed_at values separately date the company and insolvency assessments, whose slabs are cached for up to four hours. A single graph can therefore contain evidence from different times.

Discovery is partial once the index is more than 48 hours beyond the end of its as_of day. Without an index, live PSC pagination can discover ancestors only; group requests explicitly report the missing reverse coverage. Inspect coverage and frontierbefore interpreting missing connections or an empty finding list.

Deliberate limitations

• Control graphs are bounded corporate PSC evidence. They do not establish complete ownership, ultimate beneficial owners or liability. Ceased PSCs and natural-person links are not traversed; foreign or ambiguous identifiers remain unresolved. Related-company findings remain separate from the subject company’s risk score.
• Property addresses are postcode-only.Full property addresses in the CCOD dataset are processed against Royal Mail's PAF database, whose licence does not cover redistribution through an API like ours. Until that changes, the address field on land holdings contains a postcode or null.
• PSC dates of birth are never returned — or even retrieved. This is a data-minimisation choice, not an omission.
• price_paid is often null. It comes solely from HM Land Registry's Additional Price Paid Data where a price was captured at registration. Null means "no price recorded", not zero value.

Your obligations when republishing

If you republish data obtained through Rotuli, you must comply with the source licences yourself — including reproducing the Open Government Licence attribution statements above and the HM Land Registry copyright notice — and you must not imply endorsement by any government body. See the Terms of Service.