Companies House is to offer the public free access to statutory accounts in data format, as part of the government's open data initiative, which it says will allow users greater opportunity and flexibility to manipulate accounts data.
The Free Accounts Data Product is designed to open up financial data on companies, increase transparency and make data analysis more efficient. Companies Houses says that accounts data currently makes up 28% of all purchased company information, and are the most accessed set of information on the register of companies after basic company details, which are also available free of charge.
Business minister Michael Fallon said: 'Open company data can benefit everyone - whether it's entrepreneurs, taxpayers, businesses or the public sector. Better data efficiency encourages innovation, delivers better public services and stimulates growth through new revenue streams.'
While many businesses now file accounts online it has, up until now, not been possible to download and search a company's accounts. All that was available was an electronic image of the paper accounts, for a fee, which required re-keying in order to do any analysis.
Dr Paul Booth technical manager at ICAEW's IT Faculty welcomed the new move, saying: 'With this development XBRL moves from being a regulatory burden to a useful tool for businesses.'
'At present Companies House is holding a lot of company accounts in digital form, but this is being "wasted" so long as users can only get hold of images. We expect that eventually (if not immediately) it will be possible to select a number of companies of interest according to the XBRL-tagged data in their accounts, and then to use the XBRL tags for analysis of the selected accounts, providing good information much more quickly and efficiently,' Booth said.
Booth said the new approach would also lead to savings especially to organisations who buy company accounts in bulk, such as credit reference agencies, while another advantage was that removing the need for re-keying of accounts would also reduce the possibility of human error.
