Terms of business

These terms are between John Haigh (trading as Priorform, business address 26 Sandford Park Place, Cheltenham, GL52 6HP) (“we”) and the organisation that uses Check the Director (“you”). They apply when you create or join an organisation, and each time you buy credits or run a report. Version 2026-11-05.

1. Business customers only

Check the Director is for businesses and professionals. By using it you confirm that you act for a business or in a profession, not as a consumer.

2. What the service is, and is not

A report sets out what the Companies House register and the documents filed there show about a person's appointments and companies, with the source of each statement. It includes flags raised by fixed, published criteria, and suggested questions.

• Companies House does not verify what is filed with it, and scanned filings are read by character recognition. A report can therefore contain errors. Check the cited source before relying on any statement.
• A flag is a prompt to ask a question. It is not a finding, and nothing in a report is a judgement of anyone's honesty, competence or character.
• A report is not a credit reference, legal or financial advice, or a check of anyone's identity. It covers the Companies House register and the documents filed there, The Gazette's corporate and personal insolvency notices, and the public registers the privacy notice lists (the UK Sanctions List, the US Treasury's and the EU's sanctions lists, the Individual Insolvency Register, HMRC's list of deliberate tax defaulters, the Charity Commission's registers of trustees, the FCA's Financial Services Register and, for a report on a person, France's register of companies and Norway's register of roles), and, for a report on a company, GLEIF's register of Legal Entity Identifiers, each as published on the date the report says it was read, and nothing else.

3. Your organisation and its members

Your organisation's account holder controls membership, billing and retention settings, and is responsible for how members use the service. Keep access to email accounts used for sign-in secure, and tell us at once if you believe an account has been misused. Where your organisation sets up single sign-on, its identity provider decides who can sign in: anyone it admits with an address on the verified domain becomes a member, and your organisation is responsible for removing leavers there.

4. How you may use reports

• Run a report only where you have a legitimate business interest in the person, and use it only for that purpose.
• You are an independent controller of the personal data in the reports you obtain, and you must comply with data protection law in how you use and keep them.
• Keep reports within your organisation. You may share them with your professional advisers, or where the law requires it. Do not publish them.
• Do not use the service to harass or discriminate against anyone, to make decisions about consumer credit, or to resell reports.
• Do not try to access another organisation's data or to disrupt the service.

4a. API access

An organisation's account holder may create API keys so that the organisation's own systems can start checks and collect reports. A key acts as the member who created it, within your organisation, under these terms exactly as if that member had used the app: each report costs a credit, the identity step is confirmed by you, and a legitimate business interest is asserted for each person checked. Keys are your organisation's responsibility: keep them secret, revoke a key you no longer control, and tell us if one may have been disclosed. Reports and their contents obtained through the API may not be resold, republished or supplied to anyone outside your organisation other than as section 4 allows. We may limit the rate of requests and suspend a key that is misused.

5. Credits and payment

Prices are shown before you buy. They are the full amount you pay. Payment is taken by Stripe, and an invoice is issued to your organisation's billing details. Credits belong to your organisation, and any member may use them. Running a report uses one credit when the report is started, or, for a larger history, the number of credits quoted to you before you confirm; the report states what it read. If a report cannot be completed, its credits are returned automatically. Occasionally a report is checked by a person before it is released; its credits stay in use while that happens.

Credits expire 12 months after they are added to your organisation, and the oldest are used first. We email your organisation's account holder 30 days and 7 days before any credits expire. Expired credits cannot be used or refunded. A credit returned for a report that could not be completed keeps its original expiry date or, if that date has passed, can be used for 30 days.

6. Retention and deletion

Reports and the documents retrieved for them are deleted at the end of the retention period your organisation has chosen (6, 12 or 24 months). Deleted reports cannot be recovered. The account holder may delete the organisation at any time; its data is removed 30 days later.

7. Data protection

We compile reports as a controller, as described in our privacy notice. If a person asks us about a report run about them, we tell them what it says about them and that it was run for a business customer's due diligence. We don't name your organisation unless the law or a court order requires it.

8. Intellectual property

We own the service and the report format. You may use the reports you obtain for your own business purposes under these terms. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

9. Liability

Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot be limited by law. Subject to that, we are not liable for loss of profit, business, goodwill or data, or for indirect or consequential loss. Our total liability in any 12-month period is limited to the amounts you paid us in that period.

10. Suspension and ending

We may suspend or close access if these terms are broken, or to protect the service or other people. You may stop using the service at any time.

11. Changes

We will tell you before these terms change. The version you accepted is recorded against your account.

12. Law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.