Our active companies are those with a Companies House Company status of 'Active' and whose latest accounts filings are not for a dormant company.
Since adding company births and deaths, we need to be clear as to what we're presenting with our active companies. Our data is updated monthly via Companies House. Each company has a 'Status' field.
**Update Feb 2025**
The "Active but in an unusual state" filter now includes companies filing dormant accounts. You may notice a sizeable change in the number of companies in your list. Analyse will only analyse active companies.
Active companies
Our active companies are those where their Company status is only the word 'Active'. We are an active company on Companies House:
Active but in an unusual state
On Companies House, there are a range of other statuses. For example: "Active - Proposal To Strike Off", "Liquidation", "In Administration" etc. We consider these to be "Active but in an unusual state". If a given company has a Company status of "Active" but their latest account filings are accounts for a dormant company, they are considered to be "Active but in an unusual state". Here's an example:
Struck off (Dissolved)
Companies which are struck off from the register are considered non-active (dead). On Companies House, these are known as dissolved companies. This is an example of a struck off (dissolved) company and here's how it looks on Companies House:
UI Implementation
In Explore, you can filter using any or all of the three options mentioned above. The default filter is set to 'Active' companies only. Analyse will only analyse active companies.
Background
Our implementation is different from the ONS' definition in their business demography analysis. Their definition is as follows:
"Being active means that the business had either turnover or employment at any time during the reference year."
We talk more about this in one of our blogs.
We currently track companies back to 2015.
Company Deaths in RTICs
At the moment we don't track company deaths in RTICs and the cumulative active companies by year visualisation reflects the total number of companies that have existed in this sector at any point.
Company deaths do occur within RTICs, and we are working on a way of better capturing these, using historical classifications of RTICs.