Solution · The Stability Play
Credit bureaus give you a score. We give you the ratio behind it. Falling current ratio, rising debt-to-equity, sudden staff-cost cuts and director resignations all show up in iXBRL months before a winding-up petition. We watch your vendor base in the same window.
From our index
Every UK sector we monitor, by risk grade. Sectors graded C, in red, are the ones to check hardest before you sign.
| Grade | Sectors |
|---|---|
| A | 17 |
| A- | 6 |
| B+ | 8 |
| B | 10 |
| C+ | 8 |
| C | 1 |
Three plays inside Vendor Risk
Run every Tier-1 supplier through the Archive Partners stability engine. Detect falling Current Ratios or rising debt-to-equity spikes months before a credit-bureau downgrade lands. See a live vendor profile under daily monitoring: R.& B.Star (Electrical Wholesalers) Limited, an £18.1m Cheshire wholesaler.
Vendors quietly shedding key personnel or slashing staff-cost lines almost always foreshadow service-delivery failures. We surface it from iXBRL the day the accounts file.
Confirm a prospective partner's "2026 Reality" matches their sales deck. Verified iXBRL, side-by-side with the claims their BD team made on the call.
In depth
Stability is the umbrella metric: a daily-refreshed A–F roll-up of the forty-one filing-derived ratios we run on every UK private company. Falling current ratio, rising debt-to-equity, staff-cost compression, going-concern qualifications, late filings, charge filings and director-resignation clusters all feed in. Each is weighted by sector volatility, a 15% staff-cost drop in retail is normal, in legal services it is a cliff edge, and the result is a single signal procurement systems and risk dashboards can act on.
Why stability and not credit score? Credit scores are lagging indicators built from settled invoices and bureau-collected hearsay. Stability is built from the primary source, iXBRL filings the morning they land, and the underlying ratios are fully auditable. When a stability grade drops, you can click straight through to the originating filing and the specific ratio that moved. When a credit score drops, you usually cannot.
The Stability surface is the layer above credit data, not a replacement for it. Procurement, supply-chain and risk teams use it for vendor onboarding gates, post-contract monitoring and quarterly board reporting. The grade refreshes daily; the underlying filings refresh whenever Companies House publishes; the alert fires as soon as the filing is parsed.
Financial health is the closest single measure to "is this vendor going to be around to fulfil my Q3 order?", and it is the question credit bureaus answer worst. We resolve it from four ratios extracted from every iXBRL filing.
The current ratio (current assets ÷ current liabilities) is the clearest cliff-edge tell. Falling current ratios, especially below 1.0, lead winding-up petitions by an average of eleven weeks across our sample. Quick ratio is the same lens with inventory stripped out, useful in sectors where inventory write-downs are common. Debt-to-equity captures balance-sheet pressure: a spike of 100% or more in a single year is rarely benign, it usually indicates either an emergency capital injection or a major borrowing facility drawdown.
Cash-burn runway estimates how many months of current cost base the vendor can fund from existing cash without new revenue. Below twelve months is amber. Below six months, with current ratio below 1.0, is red. These four ratios produce a financial-health composite that updates the morning every new iXBRL filing lands, with the underlying numbers cited. Procurement teams use them for tier-1 vendor monitoring; supply-chain teams use them for resilience reporting.
Concentration risk is the cliff edge nobody plans for: discovering, after a vendor goes down, that three of your top-ten suppliers were ultimately owned by the same parent, or registered at the same mass-virtual-office address, or running identical staff-cost compression patterns inside the same quarter.
We surface four concentration patterns. Beneficial-ownership overlap detects suppliers that look independent but share a common Person of Significant Control or parent. Registered-office clustering picks up vendors registered at known mass-virtual-office addresses (Shelton St, 128 City Rd and similar) where a fleet of seemingly independent suppliers is in reality a brass-plate structure. Sectoral synchrony detects suppliers in different SIC codes whose iXBRL signals correlate above the population mean, usually because they share an upstream dependency. Geographic concentration flags exposure clustered in regions running below the London benchmark, where macro-shocks hit harder.
The output is a network view of your vendor base, with concentration scores on the edges. Risk teams typically use it for board reporting; procurement teams use it for supplier-portfolio rebalancing before the cliff edge, not after.
Vendor stability, on the Pulse
Drop a CSV of your Tier-1 vendor base and we'll return a stability-graded report — Current Ratio, Debt-to-Equity trend, Staff-Cost Ratio and director changes — within one business day.
