I used to find out too late.

The UK recruitment industry turns over about £43 billion a year across roughly 30,000 agencies. Second largest market on earth, behind the United States. Almost all of it still runs on someone picking up a phone.

I know, because for a while that someone was me.

The arithmetic of a desk

A resourcer’s job is finding people, and you get good at it fast. You learn where engineers hide. You learn that three different job titles mean the same thing and a fourth means something else entirely. You learn to read a CV for the gap someone is hoping you won’t ask about.

Before that I was cold calling for a living, which teaches you a different lesson: the numbers are the numbers, and they do not care how you feel about them. Roughly 40 dials for one meeting. A 2–3% conversion on a cold list. Eighty per cent of conversions need five or more follow-ups, which means four out of five people who eventually say yes have already said nothing, four times.

You can be excellent at that job and still lose, because the thing that decides it is mostly when you called. The same script into a warm company is a conversation. Into a cold one it is a voicemail. Same words. Same person. Different week.

The asymmetry

Here is the strange thing about recruitment. On the candidate side you have an armoury: LinkedIn Recruiter at roughly £8,800 a seat a year, boolean strings, referral chains, a dozen tools for finding one specific engineer in a country of seventy million.

On the client side you have… a press release.

A company would announce it had raised, and by the time that reached my screen it had reached everyone else’s on the same morning. Every agency in the sector rang that week. Whoever got through first usually got the brief. Getting through first was mostly luck, and I do not enjoy building a career on luck.

It has not got easier since. Finding new clients is now the single biggest challenge for 23% of UK agencies, up seven points in two years, and 83% take between one and six months to close one. Activity is up. Conversion is down. Everyone is working harder on the same list.

What I did not know

The announcement is not the first public record of a raise. It is close to the last.

When a UK company issues shares it must file a form at Companies House within one month. Not eventually. Within a month. The form states how many shares were allotted and what was paid for them — and multiplied together, that is the money. In writing. Signed. On the public record. And for about three in four of these companies, that filing is the only place the money is ever recorded, because nobody writes a word about it.

I should be precise about what that means, because I got it wrong at first. Where a raise is announced, the announcement usually comes before the filing, not after: a company with a PR agency tells the press at close and files the instalments later. We tested sixty companies from one week and not one filing beat the news. The value is not in being early. It is in the majority that never become news at all.

About 750 of those forms are filed every working day. Nobody was reading them and turning them into a list, because reading 750 filings a day is not a job a person wants.

So I built the thing that reads them

Every working day, every share allotment filed at Companies House gets pulled, opened and parsed. The directors are read from the officers register. Press, news and the company’s own channels are searched for any announcement. On Monday morning the ones that were genuinely money going in go out as a list, cut by sector: company, amount filed, directors, whether it was announced, and a link straight to the filing.

Last week that was 100 companies and £102,797,195 across four trading days, seventeen of them over a million. Forty-five of the sixty we checked had never been reported anywhere.

The part nobody warns you about

Reading a filing sounds simple. It is not, and the ways it goes wrong are the reason this is a product rather than a spreadsheet.

• Nominal value is not money. A company can allot a million shares at a hundredth of a penny. The summary field says £1. The amount actually paid might be £2m. Read the wrong box and you understate a real raise by six orders of magnitude.
• Filers disagree with each other. Some enter the total consideration in the amount-paid field; others enter the price of a single share. Read one as the other and a £90 allotment becomes £82m. Both conventions turn up. Occasionally in the same document.
• Scientific notation. Roughly one filing in sixty writes the figure as 4.0352E7. A parser that stops at the first odd character reads £4.04 instead of £40,352,000. That one is dangerous precisely because it looks boring.
• Shares issued for nothing. Bonus issues and capitalisations look identical on the form to a funding round. No money moved.

Every one of those was found the hard way, by checking a number that looked wrong against the document it came from. Which is why every row in the register links to its filing: not as a courtesy, but because the discipline of having to be checkable is what keeps it honest.

Two things the data told me that I did not expect

Reading 24 months of allotment history back through the same parser turned up a pair of findings I have not seen written down anywhere.

Companies file in instalments. Of the companies studied, 52% filed a second allotment within 90 days of the first. That is not repeated fundraising; it is one round being drawn down in tranches, and it means an amount on a filing is not the size of a round. Which is why every row says whether the company has filed before, and why the announcement check matters: it catches the round a small filing belongs to.

And roughly a quarter of high-value filings are not raises at all. Investment trusts, VCTs, leasing vehicles and listed companies file share allotments as routine business — some of them fifty times a year. They pass every obvious filter: real company, real money, real filing. They are also completely useless to you. They are excluded here by filing frequency, a rule that only exists because the historical data made the pattern visible.

What it is not

It is not a research platform. If you need a decade of history, investor relationships, grant awards and a team verifying records by hand, Beauhurst does that properly — roughly £10m of turnover and 128 people properly — and this does not pretend otherwise. If you want every detected round in a database with a map for £100 a month, Funding Spotter does that, and this does not pretend to be alone in reading the register either.

It is not a contact database either, which matters more than it sounds. B2B contact data decays at about 22.5% a year, and the commonest complaint about every provider in that market is the same one: bounced email, wrong number, the job title from two roles ago. A dated public filing does not rot. A filing from last Tuesday is still a filing from last Tuesday in a year’s time.

Priorfile does one thing. It tells you who in your sector just got the money and never said so, who the directors are, and where the filing is. On Monday.

The limits, before you ask

• United Kingdom only. Companies registered at Companies House. No overseas coverage and no plans for any.
• Paper filings arrive late. Between 15% and 19% come in on paper and land in the following week’s register rather than being backdated quietly.
• Structural allotments are excluded — group reorganisations, holding company insertions, property SPVs, employee options exercised at nominal value. Legally allotments. No new money.
• Issuance vehicles are excluded by filing frequency, as above.
• Unusually large figures are held back for manual review rather than published automatically. A wrong number that looks impressive is still a wrong number.
• Filers make mistakes. If a line looks wrong, email me. It gets checked against the source and corrected in the next edition, with a note saying so.

Where the data comes from

All of it from Companies House under the Open Government Licence v3.0, which permits commercial reuse provided the source is credited. That credit is on every page here and in every edition.

Talk to me

Email sam@priorfile.com or find me on LinkedIn. It is one person, so that address reaches me and not a queue.

And if you think the whole premise is wrong — that timing is not the constraint, that knowing early changes nothing — that is genuinely the most useful email you could send. I spent long enough on a phone to know the difference between someone being polite and someone telling you something true.