Dun and Bradstreet’s Company Documents Service ­ which provides access to Companies House documentation such as corporate accounts, certificates, financial information and returns ­ received a revamp this year.

What has been enhanced is the customisability of access to documentation. You can order custom packages, tweak six of the options quite rigorously, and save them for each client subscribed. Information on up to 100 companies can be ordered at any one time, which should be more than adequate.

Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) says typical users are credit, legal and insurance businesses, but the revamp lets users tailor packages that focus on anti-money laundering reports, for example, or know-your-customer information.
Prices range between 78p and £2.56 for a document. D&B subscribers pay for the total volume of documents that they access over a 12-month period, including D&B business reports.

The initial search starts off with choice of country, although most searches will centre on the UK. You then add the company name ­ and a location if desired. An initial summary appears of the company, its address, registration number, latest account details and returns. A menu system beneath acts as a gateway to the next stage of information retrieval, which is where Company Documents Service really starts to flex its muscles.

From this stage on, the system also gets a little more complex. It would be wrong to criticise D&B for providing choice and customisation of information delivery ­ that is what is available in spades here ­ but new or infrequent users should be prepared to have a good idea of what they want and how they want it before going any further.

With one particular customised search conducted, I ignored the more general accounting information files and ordered a selection of liquidation documents. With a wide choice available I selected a batch at random from the long list. The chosen files then appeared in the next screen filed in chronological order. However, the layout was haphazard and it was unclear why the information was not presented as a simple list.

That aside, it’s a step-by-step process of picking and choosing the information required, and you can even customise a little how the documents are sent.

Get the FAQs straight
If you do get overwhelmed with it all, the site’s FAQs are excellent, offering an easy-to-navigate glossary of all the terms and acronyms as well as the types of packages and what they should be used for. Novices to Company Documents Service will quickly learn to appreciate what is on offer and even veteran users will dip in from time to time to clarify the meaning of a code or to choose the right information package.

A lot of time and thought has been spent on providing clear and easy-to-understand answers. The FAQs section enhances the experience of using Company Documents Service and reflects the polish and scope of the system as a whole.
Just like rival platform MyICC, reviewed in the April issue of IWR, Company Documents Service offers documentation in PDF format. The PDFs can be downloaded, emailed or opened up online. D&B is keen to stress that it doesn’t deliver bulky emails; instead, a list of the selected reports are sent across and fully linked within two hours of a user requesting them. You then have three days to access each report and, if you choose, download it to your hard drive.

You can access information on the fly and skip the email delivery, but this is better suited for grabbing the odd file rather than ordering in bulk. Clearly, D&B doesn’t want masses of files from users clogging up its connection pipes, or those of its clients (which may have bandwidth restrictions), but the three-day limit feels like a way of making life easier for D&B rather than its customers.

Such detailed customisation tools can sometimes be a double-edged sword if you just want to get in and get out. The weight of options and criteria in selecting information and delivery method can make the process feel fussier, less linear and more long-winded than ICC’s “go anywhere in three clicks” alternative.

What is an improvement is that, unlike MyICC, Company Documents Service’s documentation PDFs launch in their own window, so you don’t have to keep hitting the back button to navigate back once you have started down an information trail.
Company Documents Service remains a well-developed and well-thought-out site. It’s not a brand-new product, but it is more than keeping up with the
competition.