Daily Signal API. Company data, plugged into your systems.

Don’t just look at the data, plug it in

Most UK corporate-data products end at “Active” or “Dissolved.” Ours doesn’t. The Daily Signal API returns Real-Time Margin Shift, allowing your systems to flag the 0.86% margin collapse in Manchester before your competitors see it. Same for the £10.2M turnover threshold, the staff-cost cliff, the falling current ratio, every one of the 41 named stability checks.

Most APIs tell you what a company was. Ours tells you what it is this morning, including the year-on-year margin shift the bureaus won’t surface for another quarter.

The endpoint is REST, the payload is JSON, and signals update the same day a filing is published at Companies House.

What the API actually returns

For every active UK company we expose three families of fields, each refreshed daily:

• Identity — company number, registered office cluster grade (Headquarters / Co-working / Mailbox), SIC code, last filing reference.
• Financials — turnover, operating profit, staff costs, headcount, current ratio, debt-to-equity, plus the real-time margin shift vs the previous filing period.
• Signals — every stability check that fires for the entity, with provenance back to the originating iXBRL filing reference.

Each call cites the originating Companies House filing reference, so compliance and audit teams can verify any field end-to-end.

Daily Re-aggregation

The numbers behind every API call are recomputed every business day at 04:00 GMT against the live UK iXBRL population. That means:

• Peer-set medians shift as the population shifts. When a new £10.2M-crossing filing lands, the SIC peer-set distribution moves, and so does the percentile your watchlist company sits at.
• Trends are measured against today, not last quarter. Margin shift, current-ratio decay and staff-cost ratios are all computed against a rolling trailing-twelve-month window, never a stale snapshot.
• Signal flags fire same-day. If a watched entity files at 14:00, the next 04:00 GMT pass will have it scored. Webhook subscribers see the event as soon as the filing is parsed.

This is what most bureaus mean when they say “real-time.” This is what we mean.

Real-Time Margin Shift

The flagship event family. We compute year-on-year operating-margin movement at the filing level, then expose the delta as a signed percentage on every API response. Three reasons it matters:

1. It’s not a credit score. It’s a clean, signed delta you can put into a quant factor, a procurement scoring rule, or a Slack alert without further transformation.
2. It moves before the bureau models do. The bureaus refresh quarterly. We refresh daily. The window between is where alpha lives, and where the Manchester sample’s compression first surfaced this cycle.
3. It’s traceable. Every margin shift cites the underlying iXBRL operating-profit and turnover tags. If your compliance team asks how the number was derived, we can show them.

The Transparency Index™

Not all UK data is created equal. While London (85% Transparency) offers clear visibility into 2026 margins, our data shows a sharp shift in regions like Birmingham (12% Transparency), where abridged filings under FRS 105 are the norm and full Profit & Loss tags are simply absent from the iXBRL stream.

The Archive Partners API automatically detects Data Opacity at the entity level and switches its scoring engine to analyse Cash-to-Debt Ratios and Asset Liquidity, ensuring you never make a decision based on a Null value.

How the Index is computed

For every UK company we expose a per-entity Transparency Score on every API response, alongside the regional aggregate:

• transparency_score (0–100) — derived from the share of the standard 41-check signal taxonomy that has full iXBRL tag coverage on the company’s most recent filing.
• transparency_grade — A through F band, mapped from the score.
• scoring_mode — either profit_first (full P&L visibility, standard model) or liquidity_first (Section 444 abridged filer, balance-sheet model active).
• opacity_drivers — array naming which iXBRL tags are missing (e.g. Turnover, OperatingProfitLoss, StaffCosts).

Regional aggregates are exposed alongside, so a London-registered firm and a Birmingham-registered firm in the same SIC peer set carry honest, comparable scores rather than false equivalence.

Why “Liquidity-First” matters

When the Profit & Loss layer is missing, most credit and risk products either return Null or quietly substitute a sector average. We do neither. The API switches to a Liquidity-First scoring engine that derives a proxy stability score from the disclosures that are present in every UK filing, even abridged ones:

• Cash-to-Debt Ratio — cash-at-bank against total liabilities, taken from the balance sheet which all UK filers (including FRS 105 abridged) must publish.
• Asset Liquidity — current assets / total assets, with the working-capital trend computed on a year-on-year basis.
• Net Working Capital position — current assets less current liabilities, against the SIC peer-set distribution for matched FRS 105 filers (so we benchmark against the right comparable, not against full-disclosure firms).
• Filing-cadence reliability — late-filing history, audit-firm continuity, charge filings, all available on the public register regardless of disclosure regime.

The result is a single proxy stability score that is genuinely comparable to the profit-first score for transparent regions. The user of the API never sees a Null; they see either profit_first: 0.84 or liquidity_first: 0.71 with the basis attached.

What this means for high-end users

Three concrete consequences for desks running M&A, vendor-risk or alt-data workflows against the UK private-company register:

• No regional black holes. Birmingham is not invisible just because its FRS 105 mix is high, you get a proxy stability score you can act on, with the methodology disclosed on every row.
• No silent average substitution. When a sector-average shim is used by a bureau model, you typically don’t know. Our scoring_mode field is explicit. Compliance and audit teams can defend the number end-to-end.
• No false equivalence between regions. A 23.31% London margin and a “12% Transparency” Birmingham null are not the same datum. The Index makes the difference machine-readable so your downstream models can weight the two correctly.

Subscribers running quarterly procurement or M&A reviews against UK regional samples should treat the Transparency Index as a top-of-funnel filter, not to exclude opaque regions, but to route them through the right scoring engine.

Sample response

A representative GET on a London company, returned as JSON:

{
  "company_number": "12345678",
  "company_name": "Apex Holdings (UK) Ltd",
  "registered_office": {
    "address_line_1": "1 King William Street",
    "locality": "London",
    "postcode": "EC4N 7AF",
    "cluster_grade": "Headquarters",
    "cluster_size": 1
  },
  "filing": {
    "filing_reference": "CH-2026-03-18-7821",
    "period_end": "2026-03-18",
    "format": "iXBRL",
    "regime": "FRS 102",
    "parsed_at": "2026-03-18T14:23:11Z"
  },
  "metrics": {
    "turnover_gbp": 9600000,
    "operating_profit_gbp": 2237760,
    "operating_margin": 0.2331,
    "real_time_margin_shift_yoy": 0.018,
    "staff_costs_gbp": 1248000,
    "average_headcount": 41,
    "current_ratio": 2.14
  },
  "peer_set": {
    "sic_code": "62012",
    "sic_description": "Business and domestic software development",
    "margin_percentile": 88,
    "regional_benchmark_city": "London",
    "regional_benchmark_margin": 0.2331
  },
  "transparency": {
    "score": 92,
    "grade": "A",
    "regional_grade": "A (London, 85% transparency)",
    "scoring_mode": "profit_first",
    "opacity_drivers": []
  },
  "signals": [
    {
      "name": "Margin Stable",
      "tone": "pos",
      "delta_yoy_pct": 1.8,
      "filing_reference": "CH-2026-03-18-7821"
    },
    {
      "name": "Top 5% margin in SIC peer set",
      "tone": "pos",
      "filing_reference": "CH-2026-03-18-7821"
    }
  ]
}

Same call against a Manchester comparable in the current sample would return a real_time_margin_shift_yoy close to zero and a Margin Compression signal in the signals array. Same payload schema, opposite direction.

Limits and caps

• Sandbox tier: 5-day trial, capped at 10 entities.
• Core: Capped at 2,500 watchlist entities, daily JSON delivery + webhooks.
• Enterprise: Unlimited watchlist, peer-set benchmarking, GDPR & 2026-transparency grading.
• Partner: Custom: raw 24-hour pulse dump, priority delivery, dedicated infrastructure.

Every tier includes the same JSON schema and the same Companies House filing-reference provenance. The only thing that changes is volume and SLA.