WRITTEN ON January 15th, 2005 BY Peter Reed AND STORED IN Uncategorized
Companies house offers a service on the web called WebCHeck, which allows users to search for a company name, access basic information from the company registration, and request more detailed information (at a price).
The service is fine, as far as it goes, but is only available from Monday to Saturday 7.00am to 12 Midnight UK Time. Why?
5 Responses to “Office hours”
I think poor service – if this is poor service – is a different matter from conspiracy. Unless one takes the view that people who get poor public services are victims of a grand conspiracy of neglect, a passive aggression of inertia.
Unless things have changed, I will soon have to mail my company’s annual return to Companies House.
They only accept returns on paper, which they then scan!
Unless things have changed they do not accept returns in electronic format.
Yes, they know that the IR now accepts the same information in PDF format attached to online Corporation Tax returns!)
They are getting much better than a couple of years back, it used to be something like 9am-7pm Monday to Friday.
I sent an Enquiry to Companies House yesterday, and got a fairly comprehensive reply back at about 10:00 this morning. It seems that the information is held and updated on a mainframe system, and transferred to the web server each night. They have plans to move away from the legacy systems so it may become more flexible in future.
I’ve worked on some pretty cranky systems in my time, but I’m still not sure I quite see why any system should be out for 49 hours a week for data transfer – however, I’m sure overnight demand is limited, and I’m feeling generous this morning so I’m prepared to award….
5/10 for a system that is OK when it is available, but not available enough
8/10 for providing a speedy, clear and detailed response to my enquiry
9/10 for being prudent with our money
Because they do maintenance on a Sunday?
It took me about three and a half seconds to work that out….
It takes not much money to add web access to an existing database; to duplicate everything so you can have web acess while maintenance is being done costs a bit more than that….
Or would you rather pretend it’s a conspiracy?