Monday 8th June
In what I feel is a pleasant change I am going to write primarily on product updates and enhancements this week. Yes, for once I have things to discuss that are complete rather than just writing about when’s, ifs and coming soons! The reason is that, over the last few weeks, we have been building up a picture of what changes will look like on our online services, as well as introducing some enhancements now to improve the service we provide.

So what is new? Well, we have improved our company status information on Republic of Ireland companies to be more descriptive, and in line with those at the Dublin Registry. We have enhanced our Consumer Credit Reporting Gateway (powered by our friends at CallCredit) to enable multiple address searches, take advantage of their improved Scorecard (called Gauge) and make the reports easier to understand. Apparently the score card includes a section that rates how potentially deceased you are!!! I thought this was impossible (it is a fairly finite thing after all), however at 3am when both my twins are screaming due to teething this idea seems more realistic! We have added key graphs into reports in our Credit Management tool. We now enable all our clients to export tracker monitoring groups into Excel and we have a new look score gauge to make the credit score easier to interpret. Also, we have made it easier than ever for any report to be updated by our in house credit assessment team (who provide offline credit report updates on both limited companies and non limited businesses and proprietors).

One really useful addition to the product suite is the ability to have IP authentication and registration for users to ICC services. For our clients who have 1000's of potential users, or are trying to manage access for the right people in their organization, this is an ideal way of improving transparency and managing access effectively.

As well as updates to services now, we have been building our prototype pages ready for introduction in October. I have included a link to our image availability page so you can see how we are thinking of highlighting old and new documents - any comments are welcome.

Click here to see the image.

We are also working on our matching rules and display details for our improved people reports. To combat the inevitable degradation of address data on directors, members and shareholders we will be highlighting match grades on our reports so they are easier to understand. We are struggling somewhat with how we display and detail the new annotations file. Annotations are all based around documents but (unless we cannot see the wood for the trees) we can’t find in the specification documentation from Companies House anything that matches an annotation record to a specific document!!! I am sure we will find a way.

Work is still continuing to ensure our API and Bulk Data clients are not impacted by the key Act changes. If you are a client that takes bulk data sets from us I urge you to sign up to the technical bulletins being issued regularly as they are a valuable source of information. Pragmatism is still the watch word here with all solutions viewing business continuity and limiting client effort as the primary directive.

I sense a mood of optimism in the project management, development and data architect teams. They have a lot of ‘stuff' to do but they are focused and making headway. It is a nice mood to detect.

Finally, I return to a topic I raised in my last post; Credit Agency Regulation and the EU. It would appear that the regulation is not intended to effect credit checking for 'industrial relations' - so if anybody fancies trying to let me know what constitutes ‘industrial relations’ - and what does not - I would welcome their understanding.

If you are at the Library and Information Conference next week I will see you there. I suspect with an umbrella as the last few days have probably been our great British summer. However perhaps, just perhaps, we are in for a good summer (in more ways than one).