Customers, vendors and contacts
Last updated
Companies House Lookup adds a Companies House section to the Customer, Vendor and Contact cards, so you can tie a record you already have to the register and keep its details right.
The Companies House FactBox
Every Customer, Vendor and Contact card shows a Companies House FactBox with, for that record's registration number:
- Registration No. - choose it to open the full snapshot
- Registered Name - the legal name on the register
- Trading Name - the name they actually trade under, if you have recorded one
- Company Status - shown in red when the company is in distress
- Incorporation Date
- Last Refreshed - how current the information is
The FactBox reads what the app has already stored, so opening a card never calls Companies House and can never make the card slow. A card with a registration number the app has not looked up yet shows an empty FactBox - use Companies House snapshot to fetch it.
Link an existing record to the register
If a customer already has the right registration number in Registration Number, choose Companies House snapshot and the company is fetched and shown.
If it has no registration number, choose Fill from Companies House. The Companies House search opens on the record's name; pick the right company and choose Use for this record. The registered name, registered office address and registration number are applied to the record you came from.
You are asked to confirm before anything is replaced, and told exactly which name is replacing which.
What Fill changes, and what it leaves alone
| Field | What happens |
|---|---|
| Name | Replaced with the registered name |
| Name 2 | Set to the trading name, but only if Name 2 is empty |
| Address, Address 2, City, Post Code, County | Replaced as a set, or left completely alone if the register holds no address for that company |
| Country/Region Code | Set from the register, unless it cannot be matched to a Country/Region - a blank is never written over a code you have |
| Registration Number | Set to the company's number |
| Everything else | Untouched - posting groups, payment terms, credit limit, dimensions, salesperson |
The registered address is replaced as a whole or not at all. Updating some lines and not others would produce an address that belongs to neither.
Why Name gets the registered name
Name flows onto every sales and purchase document as the party you are trading with. For a VAT invoice, and for any attempt to recover a debt, that has to be the legal entity rather than a brand. The trading name goes to Name 2, which Business Central prints on the continuation line:
GREGGS PLC
t/a Greggs
Match many records at once
Opening cards one at a time is no way to connect an estate you already have. On the Customers and Vendors lists, select the records you want and choose Match to Companies House. Every selected record that carries a registration number is looked up and cached, so those companies then appear on the snapshots, the Role Centre tiles and the alerts.
Records already matched cost nothing, so you can run it again later to pick up whatever has been added since. A run is capped and tells you how many are left, because the Companies House quota belongs to your whole tenant.
The Not Matched to the Register tile on the Role Centre counts the customers and vendors that carry no registration number at all.
Watch a company from its card
Watch filings and Recorded filings are on the card too, so you can start monitoring a customer without going to find the watch register. See Filing watches.
Contacts
The same actions are on the Contact card, with two differences: Fill from Companies House is available on company contacts only, and for a person contact the app uses the registration number of the company they belong to when showing the FactBox and opening the snapshot.