Every company profile on Archive Partners lists a “latest filing type” — a short code like AA, CS01, or MR01. On its own it looks like registry housekeeping, the kind of field you skim past to get to turnover or county rank. But the code names the specific administrative event a company most recently reported to Companies House, and reading it correctly tells you something the financial numbers don’t: what the company has actually been doing, not just how big it is.
The two that aren’t news
Across our tracked set, the two most common codes are AA (annual accounts, including the abbreviated variant AA01) at roughly 60%, and CS01 (confirmation statement) at around 21%. Together they account for about four in five companies. Neither is a signal in itself. Every active UK company must file accounts annually and a confirmation statement at least once a year — it’s the statutory minimum, not a sign of anything unusual happening. If a company’s latest filing is AA or CS01, the honest reading is “on schedule with routine duties,” full stop.
That matters because it sets the baseline. The interesting information sits in the remaining fifth of filings, where a company has done something beyond the annual minimum.
The long tail is where the story is
AP01 (appointment of a director) and TM01 (termination of a director’s appointment) mark people moving in or out of leadership. Seen together in close succession for the same company, they usually mean a leadership transition rather than a single departure — worth a second look at the officer-count trend on the same profile. CH01 records a change to an existing officer’s details — often just an address update, sometimes a role change.
MR01 and MR04 are charge filings: MR01 registers a new mortgage or charge against the company (typically secured lending — a loan backed by company assets), MR04 records one being satisfied and released. Either one tells you the company has been active with a lender recently, which a pure turnover figure can’t.
The PSC0x family (PSC01, PSC04, PSC05, PSC07, and related codes) tracks changes to a company’s Persons with Significant Control — the individuals or entities who actually own or control it. A PSC filing means ownership or control structure changed, which is a materially different event from a routine accounts filing and worth noting on any company you’re tracking for continuity.
AD01 records a change of registered office address — sometimes trivial, sometimes an early signal a company is consolidating operations or relocating. RESOLUTIONS covers special or written resolutions passed by shareholders: share allotments, name changes, changes to the articles — the paperwork behind a genuine corporate decision, not routine admin. And DISS40 sits at the other end of the spectrum: it relates to the compulsory strike-off process. Seeing it as a company’s latest filing is a reason to check the wider profile, not a verdict on its own.
What the code doesn’t tell you
A filing type tells you the category of event, not its scale or outcome. MR01 doesn’t say how much was borrowed. TM01 doesn’t say why a director left. PSC04 doesn’t say whether control changed hands amicably or under pressure. Treat the code as a pointer to look closer — at officer count, at filing frequency, at the accounts themselves — not as a conclusion.
It’s also a single snapshot. A company’s latest filing is whichever one happened most recently at the time our data was captured; it says nothing about the filings before it. A CS01 today doesn’t mean the MR01 from three months ago stopped mattering.
Read alongside filing frequency and officer count — both covered in earlier posts in this series — the latest filing type turns a static company record into something closer to a timeline: not just what a business is, but what it’s been doing lately.