Companies House BETA allows you to download any filed item FREE as a PDF and works quite well from what I've used of it. The URL is https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/. I know it's not a question but I thought it might be handy for some.
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Used it last week
So much quicker than the Companies House direct service. Only prob I came across was not having a way to jump back to the initial home (beta) screen.
Handy for scammers as well
I have been using this for weeks - it is really good. Accounts appear online for free download immediately they are filed.
Although very useful for idly having a butchers on a Friday afternoon at what companies/accountants in your locality are filing, I am very uneasy as I see that it opens the door wide to scammers. In particular any documents that are filed will contain names, addresses, dates of birth, perhaps names of bankers and for paper documents (e.g. LLP or audited accounts) a sample of signatures and this is now instantly available free to any boiler room anywhere in the world.
Well
You could already get most of the information from here...
I like the new service but its not exactly novel.
Why are Amazon?
I tried the new service and noticed the URL for the downloaded accounts started https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/document-api-images-prod/docs/. Who are AmazonAWS?
Amazon AWS
I tried the new service and noticed the URL for the downloaded accounts started https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/document-api-images-prod/docs/. Who are AmazonAWS?
Exactly who you probably suspected. Amazon Web Services - purveyors of loud accounting solutions.........
AWS
Amazon Web Services. Basically a world-wide cloud infrastructure owned and run by Amazon that runs many cloud-hosted services. Massively scaled and one of the few parts of Amazon that appears to be profitable.
Excuse my ignorance ...
... but does that mean Companies House data is being stored on Amazon servers?
Yes. Though I suspect it is only the data you see on the beta site that is on the AWS servers (i.e. data already in the public domain).