Creditsafe

The Data City has a strong partnership with Creditsafe to source accessible financial information on each company.

Creditsafe is the world’s most used provider of online business credit reports. They have worked hard to change the way business information is used worldwide.

Creditsafe states their data is the largest wholly owned database in the industry, providing accurate and reliable data to over 200,000 subscribers across the globe. They gather data from local, trusted partners and combine it with a scoring algorithm.

You can read more about their data/methodology on their website.

Data

Creditsafe provide The Data City with a wide range of data assets which includes the likes of company financials, operating addresses, shareholders, persons with significant control and more.

Creditsafe are particularly valuable in digitising and simplifying manually submitted financial documents to Companies House (likely a PDF). Although the percentage of companies submitting digital accounts is increasing, in 2023, roughly 10% of all annual accounts are still not submitted in a digitally readable format. These are often the largest companies (which have the greatest impact on analysis).

We have combined our data with Creditsafe's to build a more complete view of each sector. Our RTICs provide a comprehensive and accurate picture of the economy, going beyond the limitations of traditional systems such as SIC codes.

RTICs combined with digitised Companies House information is a rich dataset which can be used for economic analysis.

Matching

Our data stems from Companies House. Creditsafe process documentation submitted to Companies House thus no matching is required between Creditsafe's and The Data City's data. We use Creditsafe for their digitisation of assets which power many data points on the platform and our downloads. This has allowed us to develop a paid, yet fully reproducible and downloadable economic analysis platform.

We incorporate financial data from Creditsafe for further analysis. Our unique platform stands out by offering company-level data access, setting it apart from the IDBR and ONS datasets, which are not publicly accessible.

Timeseries

Financial data spans the past six years. 

Yearly data

A given company files their annual financial accounts with a “made-up-to date”. We receive this data from Creditsafe.

We take the day of the year it was filed and represent it as a number between 1 and 365. We check whether this number falls in the first half of the year or the second half.

If the “made up to date”  is in the first half of the year, the code assigns the previous year to their financials.

If the “made up to date”  is in the second half of the year, the code assigns the current year to their financials.

We do this to answer this question: “for which year, does financial performance largely cover this one or last?”

In our platform, we apply this method to simplify calculations within analyse based on years. We also do it to simplify multiple filings for a given company within a single year.