When using Companies House lookups in EANR, there are a few things to take into account.
Below is the lookup field attached to an EA to be used as an example:
Companies can be searched in a few different ways. You can start typing the company name and this will smart search on what you are typing to try and find the company for you to select:
Alternatively, you can start typing the company number (should you know it), and this will also bring up the
company for you to select:
In certain circumstances, there are companies that will not be found obviously, such as companies whose registered names do not match that of public perception. To show this, we will use the Ministry of Defence as an example:
Here you can see that just typing the company has not brought back any results. Given that we do not know the company number, we will need to do some further searching.
Firstly, does the company's own website provide details of its company number or registered address? If it provides the company number, you can use that directly in the EANR search box. If it's just the address, then the postcode is the way to progress things via the Companies House lookup. For the MOD example, if we jumping to the Ministry of Defence’s website, we can find their registered address in the 'Contact MOD' section:
Taking this postcode, we can navigate to Companies House (https://www.gov.uk/get-information-about-a-company), and search specifically for all companies registered to this postcode:
By selecting companies and typing in the postcode, we can only find one company registered at that address: 'International Military Services Limited'. Using this process of elimination, we can deduce this is the company we are searching for:
Using this information we can go back to EANR and find the company we are looking for.
As a final option if the company still cannot be found please submit a support request.
For the meantime, adjust the EA's Employment status to 'Retired' and note the employer's details in the Notes area. Once the helpdesk confirms that the employer has been manually added, you will be able to return to the record and complete your update.