Try the UK Company Pre-Screen yourself

Part of a series on the UK Company Pre-Screen, a tool that checks a UK company’s public record before an underwriter quotes. Before you quote a UK company, know what wasn’t checked explains what it does and why.

Open the demo and choose Tesco PLC from the saved examples. You can read it in your browser without signing up. Start with one question you can answer in a couple of minutes: why does the tool recommend Refer when the checks that ran found nothing?

First, find the missing check

Read the route at the top of the Tesco page, then find the coverage card: 11 of 13 checks completed. One gap is county court judgments, a paid source the demo doesn’t cover. The other is insolvency: on the evening this example was saved, 26 October, The Gazette refused the demo server’s request. Under the rules that evening, a critical check that couldn’t run sent the case to Refer. Before you quote a UK company, know what wasn’t checked tells the whole story.

The nine saved examples are snapshots from 26 October. Since 29 October the demo lists The Gazette as not covered and checks insolvency on Companies House alone, so screening Tesco today can come out Note only. The date on the report is part of the evidence.

Next, find a reason you can read for yourself

Open Carillion PLC. This time the route is Outside appetite, under my draft rules. The two reasons are on the record: the company is in liquidation, and an insolvency case was recorded on 15 January 2018. The other entries under Notes are context, but you can point to the record that decided the route.

Compare the two tabs. For Tesco, the next job is to complete a missing check. For Carillion, it’s to review a finding already on the record. If you can explain that difference without reading the AI’s commentary, the case page has done its job.

Screen a company of your own

Use the demo-code request on the desk. A code runs live checks with a daily allowance of five pre-screens and two optional AI reviews. Cases you run are visible to you, and to me as the operator; the saved examples are visible to everyone and use none of your allowance.

Before you read a fresh result, read its coverage. A winding-up petition that appears in The Gazette before Companies House records it won’t show on the demo. That’s a known gap, not a failure, and the report says so.

Watch it fail on purpose

The code runs offline with saved data: two captured company profiles and five invented cases, no API keys. You need Git and Python 3.10 or later. Clone the repository, create a virtual environment, install the requirements, copy .env.example to .env (it selects saved data), then run python api_server.py and open http://localhost:8000. The README has the commands for Windows, macOS and Linux, and how to add free keys for live checks.

Search for Calder Valley Plumbing Ltd, company number ZZ000003, an invented business. Three sources fail on purpose: the list of officers returns an error, the ownership register times out, and the news search is rate limited. Six checks can’t run, five finish, and county court judgments stay outside coverage. Nothing that ran found a problem, and the route is still Refer.

Developers can also connect the checks to an AI assistant through MCP, a standard way of giving an assistant tools. Ask it which checks failed on Calder Valley and where it got that answer. In my test on Windows, the tool returned no questions for the broker, because the gaps were on the tool’s side, not missing information the broker could supply. The assistant suggested some anyway. Check which suggestions came from the report and which from the assistant.

Limits

• The saved cases show what the sources returned on one evening, 26 October 2026. A fresh run can differ.
• The demo doesn’t cover county court judgments or, since 29 October, The Gazette.
• The routes come from my draft rules, not an insurer’s appetite.
• The offline cases test particular behaviours; they say nothing about real companies.

First published 29 Oct 2026. Updated 8 Nov 2026: rewritten as two guided cases; the demo’s coverage since 29 October explained.