Claiming your company
Anybody can type a company number. The public register is free, so reading it needs no permission at all. The due diligence checklist is different, because it holds things nobody outside the company should see, and opening it needs evidence that you control the company rather than evidence that you know its name.
Two questions that look like one
An identity check answers one question. Is this person who they say they are, is the document real, is the face live. It answers it well.
It answers nothing about entitlement. A verified person holding a real passport is a real person. Whether that person may read the private records of a particular company is a completely separate fact, and no amount of face checking produces it.
Almost every tool collapses the two, by checking an identity and then matching the verified name against a director name on the register. snapdue does not, and the rest of this article is why.
Four ways a matching name goes wrong
Names collide. There are thousands of people called John Smith on the register, and the public officer record narrows a person only to a name, a birth month and year, a nationality and a partial address. Two directors of different companies sharing a name and a birth month is uncommon, but it is not rare, and nothing about the failure is visible.
A resigned director still matches. The register keeps former appointments, which is the whole point of a register. A director who left after a falling out matches their own name on that company forever. A name test therefore hands the pack to exactly the person an owner most wants excluded.
The register records filings, not entitlement. An appointment is something somebody filed. Reading it as proof of control is reading a claim as a credential.
A corporate officer has no person behind it. Where the director is itself a company, there is nobody to verify and nothing for a name test to compare against.
What snapdue accepts instead
Connecting the company to HMRC is the gate. When you authenticate to HMRC for a company, HMRC is telling snapdue that you hold credentials it issued to that business. That is a stronger statement than the register makes, because HMRC issues credentials to the business rather than recording what somebody filed.
The connection is not permanent. The grant lasts eighteen months, so the claim carries its own expiry and has to be renewed rather than standing forever.
Neither route is proof, and snapdue does not pretend otherwise. An agent authorisation can outlive a working relationship. What snapdue records is which route was used, when, and what it rested on, and it asks again when something material changes.
If you have no HMRC connection
A code posted to the registered office is the second route, and it is the one for an owner whose accountant holds the HMRC relationship. Post reaching the address the register itself publishes proves control of the correspondence of the company, and it defeats every failure above, including the resigned director.
It costs days and a stamp. A slow gate on the highest consequence step in the product is a feature rather than a fault.
That route is designed and not built yet. Until it is, an owner with no HMRC connection has no way to claim a company. That is a real gap and it is stated here rather than hidden.
What you can do before you claim
Everything the public register holds is open to you the moment you add the company, because it is open to anybody. The registered details, the officers, the people with significant control, the filing history, the charges and any insolvency history are all there.
What waits for the claim is the due diligence checklist, which is where your own answers and your own documents live.