Free company accounts for (almost) all UK companies, even private ones

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Free company accounts for (almost) all UK companies, even private ones

All companies registered in the UK are obligated to submit their accounts to Companies House each year. These accounts are on the public record. However, until recently, there were two issues with third party access: the format (not machine readable) and the cost (1 GBP per document). Both of these issues will soon disappear: many companies file accounts in XML (XBRL or iXBRL) because they have to prepare this format for HMRC (the UK's tax agency), and Companies House began (at the beginning of November) to publish zip files of the accounts filed each day/month.<p>That said, if you go to Companies House web site to find the most recent accounts for a particular company, you will still pay 1GBP for the privilege, as (i) you won't know which zip file to download and (ii) you won't be able to parse the XML and to search the company names.<p>I've tried to that for you. The site is still indexing the last year's accounts, but you can search for a company name and click to get their last accounts. Most are readable in a web browser, because iXBRL just adds machine-readable tags to an XHTML doc.<p>Many private companies in the UK are dormant or small, so many of these accounts have little more than a balance sheet. Any ideas for cross-sectional analysis? This would obviously require some parsing, which wouldn't be straightforward due to the variety of namespaces involved.