What Is Vigil? UK Company Monitoring Explained
Vigil monitors Companies House and the London Gazette for companies and directors you care about, then tells you what changed and what it means. Here's how the product works.
51% of UK B2B invoices are currently overdue, and 7% are written off as bad debt each year, according to Atradius's 2025 payment practices barometer. For every one of those write-offs, there was a company with warning signs that nobody caught in time.
A credit controller at a small manufacturing company extends 60-day terms to around 80 customers. She checks new customers on Companies House before issuing credit, but that's a manual process she doesn't always complete, and existing customers she's never monitored at all. She had two bad debt write-offs in three years. Both companies showed warning signs on Companies House weeks before they went under.
She didn't see them because she had no way to watch for them.
Quick summary: Vigil monitors Companies House filings and London Gazette notices for your company and director watchlist. Each alert includes a plain English explanation of what the filing means, not just notification that it occurred. For companies entering voluntary dissolution, Vigil alerts you within the 2-month window creditors have to object under Companies Act 2006, s.1003.
What Vigil does
Vigil monitors UK companies and directors on your behalf, watching Companies House filings and London Gazette notices in real time. When something worth knowing about happens at a company on your watchlist, you receive an alert the same day, with a plain English explanation of what the filing means — not just confirmation that one occurred.
The standard Companies House email alert says "a document has been filed for [Company Name]." Vigil tells you what was filed, why it might be relevant, and what the pattern looks like compared to similar companies in the same sector.
A routine confirmation statement gets a low-priority note. A second charge registered against all assets within eight months, at a company whose accounts are already overdue, gets a clear flag with a summary of what the charge pattern typically indicates.
What Vigil monitors
Companies House requires UK companies to file records of significant events: director appointments and resignations, charges registered or satisfied, confirmation statements, annual accounts, insolvency proceedings, and striking-off applications. Vigil monitors all of these as they're accepted, for every company on your watchlist.
The London Gazette carries a different category of record: formal distress events. Winding-up petitions, administration appointments, CVA proposals, and dissolution notices appear there first, often days or weeks before they're widely known.
Vigil also monitors directors, not just companies. When a director you're tracking joins a new company, resigns from an existing role, or has disqualification proceedings initiated against them, that shows up in your alerts. Directors carry risk between companies. The pattern of someone dissolving one company and quickly incorporating another is detectable in the data, and it's one of the patterns Vigil surfaces.
Who uses Vigil and why
Credit controllers
295,251 late filing penalties were issued by Companies House in 2023-24. A company filing accounts late is often either badly run or deliberately delaying the disclosure of deteriorating numbers. Credit controllers use Vigil to monitor their active customer base continuously, rather than checking at onboarding and never again. A company that was financially healthy when you extended terms may be in a different position 18 months later.
Accountants at practices
When a key supplier or customer in a client's network changes status, accountants using Vigil find out before their client does. That means a proactive call rather than a reactive one. For practices that offer due diligence as a service, the credit decision report Vigil generates becomes a billable deliverable.
Commercial solicitors
Deals take months to close. A solicitor who runs Companies House due diligence at the start of a transaction and then nothing until exchange is working with stale information. Adding counterparties to a matter watchlist at the start means an automatic alert if anything changes before completion.
B2B account managers
Director resignations are filed with Companies House within 14 days of the change taking effect. If your main contact at a key account resigns as director, you want to find out the day it's filed — not three weeks later when someone new picks up the phone and has no idea who you are.
Freelancers and sole traders
Vigil lets you look up any UK company before starting work. A company incorporated four months ago, with one director who has three previously dissolved companies behind them, is worth pausing on before raising an invoice or signing a contract.
Read more: how to spot supplier financial distress before it hits you
The Gazette integration
Nearly 24,000 UK companies became insolvent in 2025, according to the Insolvency Service. Behind each of those cases were creditors with outstanding invoices — and in many cases, warning signs that were visible weeks or months earlier in the public record.
When a company applies to be struck off voluntarily under section 1003 of the Companies Act 2006, Companies House publishes a notice in the London Gazette. From the date of that notice, creditors have two months to object to the dissolution and preserve their legal right to pursue any outstanding debt. Once the company is struck off, that right is extinguished.
Most creditors never see the notice. By the time they learn the company has been struck off, the window has closed.
Vigil monitors Gazette notices for every company on your watchlist. If a dissolution notice appears, you receive an alert the same day it's published, with the exact deadline to object and the objection process explained in plain terms. One alert can protect a debt that would otherwise be unrecoverable.
How pricing works
Vigil is in early access. Enterprise monitoring tools typically require annual contracts and a sales call to get started, a model that prices out most of the businesses that would benefit most from this data. We're building Vigil for self-serve signup at SMB pricing, with no annual contract requirement.
We're still finalising the tier structure based on what we hear from early users. Join the waitlist now and you'll get early access and founder pricing that stays with you permanently.
Frequently asked questions
What does Vigil do that Companies House alerts don't? Companies House native alerts notify you when any document is filed, with no description of the filing type and no explanation of what it means. Vigil identifies what type of filing occurred, explains it in plain English, contextualises it against comparable companies, and prioritises alerts by significance. It also monitors the London Gazette, which Companies House alerts do not cover.
Can I monitor directors as well as companies? Yes. You can build a director watchlist alongside your company watchlist. Alerts cover new appointments, resignations, and the phoenix pattern: when a director you're tracking incorporates a new company shortly after one of their previous companies dissolved.
How quickly do alerts go out? Vigil processes Companies House filings as they appear on the API feed. For most filings, alerts go out the same day the document is accepted. Gazette notices are checked daily and alerted on the day of publication.
Who is Vigil for? Credit controllers, accountants, commercial solicitors, B2B account managers, property professionals, executive recruiters, and freelancers who work with clients on credit terms. Anyone with a financial or commercial stake in knowing when something significant changes at a UK company.
Spencer Dixon is building Vigil, a UK company monitoring tool for businesses that extend credit or trade on trust.
Join the waitlist or get in touch with questions about a specific use case.