Company Liquidations up 14.6%

There were 4,716 compulsory liquidations and creditors’ voluntary liquidations in total in England and Wales in the third quarter of 2009 (on a seasonally adjusted basis). This was a decrease of 4.7% on the previous quarter but an increase of 14.6% on the same period a year ago.

This was made up of 1,301 compulsory liquidations (which are down 9.8% on the previous quarter and down 12.9% on the corresponding quarter of the previous year), and 3,415 creditors voluntary liquidations (which are down 2.6% on the previous quarter but up 30.2% on the corresponding quarter of the previous year).

In the twelve months ending Q3 2009, approximately 1 in 114 active companies (or 0.9%) went into liquidation, which is up slightly on the previous quarter when the figure was approximately 1 in 120.

Additionally, there were 1,578 other corporate insolvencies in the third quarter of 2009 (not seasonally adjusted) comprising 410 receiverships, 974 administrations and 194 company voluntary arrangements. In total these represented an increase of 9.3% on the same period a year ago.

Company Fraud

The Met have asked us to link to new pages they have put up in regard to company fraud and impersonation:

Main page
http://www.met.police.uk/fraudalert/

Company Identity Fraud
http://www.met.police.uk/fraudalert/section/company_fraud.htm

Money Transfer Fraud
http://www.met.police.uk/fraudalert/money_transfer.htm

Buying and Selling Vehicles
http://www.met.police.uk/fraudalert/news/buying_selling_vehicles.htm

Please take the time to read these if you suspect you may be a victim of company impersonation or you suspect you may be being scammed by an impersonator.

More help on our pages here: http://www.ukdata.com/help/fraudalert.php

Sneaky Peak 2

Managing your company reports is going to be totally overhauled.

Rather than having a long list seperated into pages with ten companies on each we are making the whole page easier to use. A single page will list all your companies and you can choose to view 10, 20, 50 or 100 companies and sort by Company Name, Risk Score and Recent Changes.

Without leaving the page you will be able to edit your monitor options for each company and to download view and print the reports just by clicking on the company name.

This layout should help you do what you need to do more easily and allows us to add new features later such as 'export to CSV' for the financial information from a set of company accounts.

It also allows us to remove the 'My Monitors' section so that you don't need to navigate to two different sections to manage your companies.

Pie in the Sky+

Or, how not to do Customer Relations.

Having had an order problem with Sky - to do with the fact that the 'sales team' is different to the 'online sales team' - the (very friendly) operator couldn't help me. She put me on hold to see if her manager could help, the manager didn't speak to me but told the (very friendly) operator that there was nothing they could do and if I wanted any further action then I had to contact Customer Relations.

And this is the fun bit. You cannot telephone the Customer Relations team, nor can you email them. Or Tweet. Or IM.

If you, the customer, wish to speak to Customer Relations, you cannot. You must write to them.

That is not Customer Relations, unless you go back a couple of decades.

We don't want you to have an experience like that, so if you want to contact us at ukdata.com, all you have to do is pick up the phone, write an email to us, send us a tweet @ukdata and we will help you. No hassle, no 'managers' and certainly no stamps involved.

Can you print on demand?

We are building a new product to allow businesses to quickly and easily identify new business prospects and create mailing lists. Scheduled to go live in September our 'Marketing Lists' application allows clients to select from a real world list of company activities and not SIC codes which are unreliable.

From there the client can filter the list of companies by postcode sector, postcode, town or county.

So far, simple and straightforward. What we would like to do is add a further feature so that having purchased a mailing list our clients can then send a postcard or letter for next day delivery.

For example, a client comes to our website to buy a list of companies they wish to target (i.e. Graphic Designers in Surrey), they buy the list and then receive a CSV file of the contact names and addresses. The way the mailing list industry currently works that would be the end of the relationship.

What we are developing within the website is the functionality so that after buying the list a client can choose to 'Send a postcard/letter' to the contact list they have just purchased. This application will function within the browser and be very user friendly.

The client will be able to choose from a range of postcards or create their own by uploading images and writing text. For A4 letters they can upload a PDF template of their headed business stationery.

Couple of points to note, all our data is already MPS checked so we only send out legal marketing and we will launch in phase 2 a B2C service to allow consumer based businesses to contact local consumers who fit within the required profile of their audience.

An example of this would be for an attraction such as Denbies Vineyard in Dorking could choose to send a postcard to all couples without children earning over £30k who have expressed a preference for English wine and within a 3 mile radius to promote an event. (Clever Stuff!)

We will be spending significant resource on taking this to market and are looking for a business partner to manage the printing and fulfilment of this area. If you are interest please email alastair[@]ukdata.com or call me on 01372 750800.

Sneaky peek at new layout

The new design is in development now - and all the changes are aimed at making the website easier to use by allowing grouping of reports and documents in 'My Reports', a single 'My Account' page for you to manage payments, orders, invoices and account details, and an 'instant monitoring' button to add companies with the click of the mouse and without the need to navigate three pages.


















In addition, more of our website will be interactive with 'on page' actions to reduce the time you spend navigating and to help new users get the most from the website.

Less time on our website to get the same work completed = more time free for you to do something else!

Website Features - Update 2

In addition to the layout and basic function/design changes mentioned in Update 1 there are going to be some changes within the 'My Reports' and 'My Monitors' sections.

These two sections are going to be merged into one 'My Companies' area where you will be able to view the documents and reports purchased on companies and edit the monitoring alerts you wish to receive in the same place.

All purchased documents will be pre-sorted into company order with all documents relating to an individual company listed by company. So, if you have purchased multiple reports on company, it will be easier to find, sort, view, print or share these documents.



(this image may not be how the final version appears but it is a good indicator)



A new simple Monitoring On/Off button will appear beside each company name and clicking the 'edit settings' will cause a drop down box to appear where you can edit your monitoring preferences for that company.

The 'share' functionality will be improved but more on that in a later update.

Any feedback gratefully received to alastair[at]ukdata.com

New analysis from Google Ad Planner

Google have launched Ad Planner (beta) which lets you look deeper into a website metrics to see more about the visitors.

More useful for companies that buy online ad space but still some interesting user statistics on ukdata.com:






























And very impressive if you are Wikipedia.