How to Check a Company’s Corporate Structure

The way companies are structured is central to their operations, and understanding these frameworks is essential for any business.

Corporate structures are foundational to how businesses operate, and understanding them is key for assessing the risk and stability of potential partners. Whether it’s for partnerships, investments, or acquisitions, companies must conduct due diligence to ensure they are dealing with trustworthy entities.

According to Emerging Growth and Risk Trends: Data Insights on Companies in Europe, 64% of organisations consider third-party risk management, which includes assessing corporate structures, a strategic priority for their leadership teams. This reflects the growing recognition that understanding who controls and influences a business can mitigate financial and reputational risks.

However, with corporate structures becoming increasingly complex, the process of manually verifying ownership layers, Ultimate Beneficial Owners (UBOs), and related risks can take time and effort. That’s why having tools that streamline this process is invaluable, enabling businesses to conduct thorough due diligence with greater confidence and efficiency.

What are company corporate structures?

A corporate structure represents how a company is organised in terms of ownership, control, and legal entities. At its simplest, it shows the hierarchy between parent companies, subsidiaries, and affiliates. It can also reveal key people within a company, such as directors or those with significant control (known as PSCs, or Persons with Significant Control).

Corporate structures can vary greatly in complexity. Some businesses have straightforward structures, with a single parent company overseeing all operations.

Others, especially multinational corporations, can have intricate networks of subsidiaries across various countries, often involving multiple layers of ownership. These structures can be essential for a range of stakeholders to understand, from law firms and advisory clients to universities and corporate partners.

Why would a company want to check a corporate structure?

1. Identifying Ultimate Beneficial Owners (UBOs)

Identifying the UBOs and understanding the jurisdictions of all entities in a corporate structure is crucial for law firms and advisory clients.

UBOs, often hidden through layers of holding companies or offshore entities, can pose varying levels of regulatory risk depending on their location or background. Ensuring you know who ultimately controls a business helps maintain compliance with anti-money laundering (AML) regulations. It also helps avoid reputational or financial risks associated with high-risk or sanctioned owners.

Beauhurst simplifies this process by allowing you to quickly check the jurisdiction of every entity within a corporate structure and identify the ultimate parent company. This comprehensive view of the entire ownership chain ensures that due diligence is both thorough and efficient.

2. Conducting a company health check

Understanding a company’s corporate structure is vital for due diligence. For businesses considering partnerships, investments, or acquisitions, assessing the health and legitimacy of a potential partner is crucial.

This includes checking the financial stability of the organisation and ensuring there are no hidden risks, such as ties to unregulated or high-risk entities.

Beauhurst allows you to see where the accounts are consolidated, giving you a comprehensive view of the company’s financial health and where its reporting is centralised.

Beauhurst also flags risk signals that are critical for making informed decisions. For instance, the platform highlights County Court Judgements (CCJs), which can indicate a company has faced legal action for unpaid debts. This can be an early warning sign of financial instability or mismanagement. Similarly, the platform also tracks liquidation and insolvency statuses, which are clear indicators of a company being unable to meet its financial obligations.

Beauhurst links all related entities in a corporate structure, enabling you to assess risk factors and identify potential financial distress or liabilities across multiple subsidiaries and parent companies — all in one comprehensive view.

How to check a company’s corporate structure manually

For businesses and institutions that need to verify the legitimacy of potential partners, manually checking a company’s corporate structure can be a lengthy and laborious task. In the UK, this involves using Companies House, where key documents like confirmation statements, annual accounts, and PSC (Persons with Significant Control) filings must be reviewed.

Tracking ownership changes requires reviewing shareholder updates in confirmation statements, while PSC filings reveal who holds significant influence.

However, this process becomes time-consuming when companies employ layers of holding companies or offshore entities, making it difficult to trace Ultimate Beneficial Owners (UBOs). Each layer adds complexity, often requiring hours or days of cross-referencing records.

Identifying subsidiaries or parent companies involves combing through annual reports or tracing connections via company directors who may hold positions across multiple entities. Without a unified platform to aggregate this data, manually piecing together a company’s full structure can take significant time and effort, especially when information is incomplete or unclear.

This manual process not only consumes valuable resources but also leaves room for potential gaps in understanding a company’s full structure, which can expose businesses to risk when making critical partnership decisions.

How to check a company’s corporate structure using Beauhurst

When conducting due diligence or preparing for investments, acquisitions, or partnerships, it’s crucial to verify the legitimacy of the company in question. Beauhurst simplifies this by providing immediate access to comprehensive corporate structure data, directly through its platform.
Let’s imagine that you’re an advisory or law firm working with a business client, and you need to quickly understand a company’s structure and who ultimately controls it.

Using the ‘Corporate Structure’ tab on the left of any company profile, you can immediately access a detailed view of the company’s ownership hierarchy. From here, you’ll be able to see the entire corporate structure at a glance, tracing from subsidiaries up to the ultimate parent company.

On the Corporate Structure page, you’ll see this.

On the same tab, you can also access key details such as the Companies House ID, jurisdiction, and account consolidation status of all entities within the corporate structure. All of this information can be easily downloaded as a PDF, making it simple to share with colleagues or clients.

Moreover, the data is fully searchable, allowing you to quickly identify if any companies within the corporate structure have a County Court Judgement (CCJ) or if they are owned outside of the UK.

Conclusion

Understanding a company’s corporate structure is essential for making informed decisions. Whether you’re navigating partnerships, investments, or acquisitions, the ability to quickly assess ownership, financial stability, and potential risks like UBOs or CCJs is critical.

With Beauhurst, you avoid the time-consuming process of sifting through fragmented filings and manually cross-referencing data. Instead, you get a consolidated, accurate view of a company’s corporate structure and any associated risks, ensuring you can make informed decisions quickly and confidently.

Get access to this data

It couldn’t be easier to get access to this data yourself. And from the Beauhurst platform, you can find even more information.

As a law firm or advisory, you can use BeauhurstAdvise to:

• Perform industries-specific analysis
• Demonstrate industry insights by monitoring client activities and industry development
• Secure top clients regardless of key personnel, aligning with location and scale
• Keep an eye on competitors
• Speed up due diligence
• And get help with data-based reporting