The invoice that does not get paid is one of the most common causes of small business cash crises. Not fraud, not bad luck — just a client whose own financial position quietly deteriorated while you kept delivering, kept invoicing, and kept assuming the money would arrive.
By the time you find out, you are usually owed more than you would have been if you had known earlier. You have done additional work. You have not chased as hard as you might have. You have not made contingency arrangements. And now you are managing a problem rather than preventing one.
The information that would have warned you was available. It just was not in any tool you were looking at.
What Companies House knows
Every UK limited company is required to file accounts with Companies House. Those accounts contain information about the company's financial position — assets, liabilities, net worth. They are filed annually, they are publicly accessible, and they tell a story about whether a company is financially healthy or under strain.
Beyond the accounts, Companies House records director appointments and resignations, confirmation statement filings, registered office changes, and company status — including whether a company has entered administration, liquidation, or receivership.
None of this information is secret. It is freely available to anyone who knows to look. The problem is that nobody looks — not routinely, not for every client, not before every invoice is raised. It takes time. It requires knowing what to look for. And for most small businesses, it simply does not happen.
What the combination reveals
Companies House data alone is useful. Combined with your own invoice data — who owes you, how much, for how long — it becomes genuinely actionable.
A client with accounts filed 60 days late and two director resignations in the past year, who also happens to owe you £12,000 on invoices that are already overdue, is a materially different risk profile from a client with the same outstanding balance but clean filings and stable leadership. The first warrants immediate action. The second warrants a chase email.
Without the combination, you cannot see the difference. With it, the picture is clear.
What Strafi does with this
Strafi identifies your significant clients — the ones who represent more than 10% of your revenue — from your invoice data. For each of them it runs a Companies House lookup automatically, checks filing lateness, director changes, company status, and accounts health. It also runs a web research pass — recent news, sector conditions, any public signals of difficulty.
The results are stored and updated weekly. When you receive a briefing, Strafi surfaces any client showing elevated or high risk alongside the relevant detail: what it found, what it means, and how it connects to what that client owes you.
A client confirmed in liquidation with £6,000 outstanding is not just an accounts receivable problem. It is potentially an unrecoverable debt. Strafi tells you that explicitly, before you do more work for them, before the situation gets worse, before the formal notice arrives.
The pipeline dimension
The same intelligence applies to prospective clients in your pipeline — not just existing clients. When you add a deal to Strafi, it runs the same checks on the prospect company. A £40,000 proposal with a company showing signs of financial difficulty is a different decision than the same proposal from a company with clean filings and stable leadership.
Committing resource to a client who cannot pay is a compounding risk. You spend the time, you do not get paid, and you have forgone other work you could have taken on instead. Knowing before you start is worth considerably more than knowing after.
What this is not
This is not a credit check service. Strafi is not a lender assessing risk for a loan decision. It is a financial intelligence layer that watches the companies you do business with and surfaces signals that are relevant to your own financial position.
The distinction matters. A credit check is a point-in-time assessment for a specific decision. Strafi's client intelligence is continuous monitoring — checking weekly, updating when things change, surfacing information in the context of your own invoice and payment data rather than in isolation.
Most small businesses have never had access to this kind of ongoing client monitoring. It has always required a credit team, a subscription to a credit reference agency, or a manual process that nobody has time to maintain. Strafi runs it automatically, in the background, for every significant client, every week.
The moment that makes it real
One of our early test accounts had a client — a creative agency — representing about 20% of their revenue. Companies House showed the agency's accounts were overdue, their registered office had moved to a known insolvency practitioner address, and two directors had resigned in the previous six months. Outstanding invoices: £8,600.
That information was all publicly available. Nobody was hiding it. It just required knowing to look, knowing where to look, and connecting it to the £8,600 outstanding balance. Strafi did that automatically and surfaced it in the next briefing.
The outcome in that specific case was a test scenario with dummy data. But the intelligence was real — the agency described was genuinely in those circumstances on Companies House. The gap between having that information and not having it is the gap between acting and being acted upon.
That is what client intelligence is for.