Glossary
Plain-English definitions of the specialist terminology Senserity uses, covering corporate structure, compliance, data sources, and Senserity-specific vocabulary.
The glossary is the canonical reference for specialist terminology used across Senserity. It covers corporate-structure vocabulary (PSC, UBO, shadow director), compliance terms (Modern Slavery Act, Cyber Essentials, ISO 27001), data sources (Companies House, the London Gazette, Dilisense), and the Senserity-specific terms that appear in the product interface (insight test, DRV-055, credit, watchlist).
The same definitions power the small question-mark tooltips inside the Senserity app, so what you read here is what a teammate sees when they hover over a term in a card.
Showing 73 of 73 terms.
- administration
A rescue procedure run by a court-appointed administrator.
Administration is a formal insolvency procedure under the Insolvency Act 1986 designed to either rescue the company as a going concern, achieve a better result for creditors than liquidation, or realise property to pay secured/preferential creditors. While in administration, the company is shielded from most creditor action (a moratorium is in force).
- annual accounts
The company's yearly financial statements filed at Companies House.
Statutory financial accounts must be delivered to Companies House annually. The complexity depends on company size: micro, small, medium or large. Late filing incurs automatic penalties and sustained non-filing can lead to strike-off. Senserity parses iXBRL-tagged accounts to extract financial metrics.
- applicant
The party named on a patent filing as seeking protection.
Patent records name an applicant rather than carrying a company registration number, so filings are matched to companies by name. Senserity requires an exact match on the registered name and, where the filing records it, a UK address. Filings naming a similarly named business in another country are excluded rather than wrongly attributed.
- appointment
A director or secretary being added to a company.
Officer appointments must be notified to Companies House within 14 days. Senserity monitors new appointments as an early signal of changes in control, governance, or strategic direction.
- attestation campaign
A batch of compliance questionnaires sent to a group of suppliers.
A campaign bundles together a template (the questions), a list of recipients (the suppliers), and a deadline. Recipients receive a unique link to respond without needing a Senserity login. You track responses, chase non-responders, and approve or reject submissions from the campaign dashboard.
- category score
A score for one of the nine risk categories.
Each company is scored independently across the nine risk categories: Financial, Governance, Compliance, Cyber, Legal, Media, Operational, Social & ESG, and Network. The category score is a weighted aggregation of the individual tests that apply to the company. The overall score (DRV-055) combines these using the category weightings.
- CCEW
The Charity Commission for England and Wales.
The CCEW registers and regulates charities in England and Wales, publishing each charity's objects, trustees, accounts, and any regulatory inquiries. Senserity ingests the CCEW bulk dataset to cross-reference director and PSC relationships into the charity sector.
- charge
Security granted over a company's assets to a lender.
A charge gives the lender (chargee) a right to the company's specified property if the debt is not repaid. Charges must be registered at Companies House within 21 days of creation or they risk being void against liquidators and other creditors. Active, satisfied, released, and outstanding charges are all tracked on the public register.
- Companies House
The UK registrar of companies and the primary source for company data.
Companies House holds the statutory register of UK companies, recording incorporations, officer appointments, filings, charges, PSCs and dissolutions. Senserity ingests both the bulk monthly CSV snapshot and the real-time streaming feed, supplemented by the public API for on-demand detail.
- company secretary
An officer who supports compliance, filings, and board governance.
Private companies are not required to appoint a secretary, but public companies (PLCs) must have one. The secretary's duties typically include maintaining statutory registers, filing annual returns, and supporting the board. Senserity tracks secretary appointments and terminations as a governance signal.
- comparable right
A UK trade mark created automatically at the end of the Brexit transition.
EU trade marks stopped covering the UK when the transition period ended on 31 December 2020. To avoid holders losing protection, the UK IPO created an equivalent UK registration — a comparable right — for every EU mark in force at that date, keeping the original filing date. Their presence shows a brand was protected EU-wide before 2021, indicating an established brand history rather than recent filings alone.
- confidence
How much weight we place on a particular finding.
Confidence reflects the quality and specificity of the evidence underlying a test result. A high-confidence result is based on an exact match in an authoritative source; a low-confidence one might depend on name-matching or indirect inference. Low-confidence findings are surfaced but weighted less in scoring.
- confirmation statement
An annual filing confirming the company's basic information.
A Companies House filing (formerly the annual return) confirming that the company's details on file — registered office, officers, PSCs, share capital, SIC codes — are up to date. Must be filed at least once every 12 months. Late confirmation statements can trigger strike-off action.
- continuation date
The date an operator licence next falls due for renewal.
Operator licences run indefinitely, subject to a periodic continuation at which the operator confirms its details and pays a fee. A date that has passed while the licence still shows as valid is a contradiction in the public register. Where the gap is long, it more often reflects a stale entry in the licensing record than years of unlawful operation, since a Traffic Commissioner would have acted well before.
- credit
The unit used to pay for on-demand actions like refreshes and reports.
Each tier includes a monthly credit allowance that resets on your billing date. Credits pay for on-demand actions: forcing an immediate refresh, generating a PDF report, sending an attestation, or API calls beyond your allowance. Scheduled monitoring is included and uses no credits. Monthly credits are spent first; topup credits are drawn next, and if both are exhausted, on-demand actions pause until top-up or renewal.
- Creditsafe
A commercial credit risk data provider.
Creditsafe provides credit risk reports, scores, and credit limit recommendations for UK and international companies. Senserity includes Creditsafe in the data set on every paid plan, refreshed as part of scheduled monitoring at no credit cost. An on-demand refresh outside the schedule uses credits.
- curtailment
A sanction cutting the number of vehicles an operator may run.
After a public inquiry, a Traffic Commissioner may curtail a licence by reducing its authorised vehicle or trailer numbers, suspend it so it cannot be used at all, or revoke it entirely. Curtailment is a proportionate sanction short of revocation — the operator continues, but with less capacity. Only a small fraction of licences carry either sanction at any time, which is what makes the finding informative.
- Cyber Essentials
A UK government-backed baseline certification for cyber security.
Cyber Essentials is an NCSC-backed scheme that certifies an organisation against five technical controls: firewalls, secure configuration, user access control, malware protection, and patch management. Cyber Essentials Plus additionally requires a hands-on technical audit. Certificates are issued by accredited bodies (IASME is the national partner) and are valid for 12 months.
- Dilisense
A sanctions, PEP and adverse-media data provider.
Dilisense aggregates global sanctions lists, politically exposed persons registers, and adverse media feeds into a single searchable dataset. Senserity uses Dilisense as one input to its adverse media and sanctions checks against watchlisted companies and their officers.
- Director
An officer legally responsible for managing a company's affairs.
UK company directors are appointed to the board and are subject to statutory duties under the Companies Act 2006. Every private limited company must have at least one director who is a natural person. Directors are separately recorded in Companies House and can be active, resigned, or disqualified.
- display type
How an insight test's finding is rendered in the UI.
Every test has a display type that controls how the result is shown: a simple badge, a table, a timeline, a bar chart, a network fragment, and so on. Display types are registered centrally so that new tests can reuse existing visualisations or introduce new ones as needed.
- disqualified director
A person legally barred from acting as a company director.
Under the Company Directors Disqualification Act 1986, a person can be disqualified for up to 15 years for misconduct such as wrongful trading, failure to keep proper accounts, or tax fraud. The disqualified directors register is public and Senserity cross-checks it against officers of watchlisted companies.
- dissolved
The company has been formally struck off the register.
Dissolution removes a company from the Companies House register. It can be voluntary (the directors apply to strike off) or compulsory (the Registrar initiates it, typically because the company has failed to file accounts or confirmation statements). Any remaining assets pass to the Crown as bona vacantia. Dissolved companies can be restored in some cases.
- DRV-055
The overall Senserity risk score for a company.
DRV-055 is the top-level risk score, running from 0 to 100 where lower is better. It is computed by combining the nine category scores (DRV-056 to DRV-064) using weightings defined in app_scoring_weights. A value below 20 is generally considered safe to onboard; higher values warrant closer review.
- enrichment
The process of pulling external data about a company into Senserity.
Enrichment covers everything from Companies House profile fetch and officer history, through adverse media scans, to commercial sources like Creditsafe. On paid plans the full data set is refreshed automatically on your monitoring cadence at no credit cost; credits apply only to an on-demand refresh. Enrichment output is what the insight tests run against.
- Environment Agency
The environmental regulator for England.
The Environment Agency regulates pollution, waste, water resources and environmental permits in England. It publishes enforcement actions, fines, and the environmental performance of regulated businesses. Senserity ingests Environment Agency public datasets as part of its ESG risk assessment.
- Espacenet
The European Patent Office's free public patent search service.
Espacenet provides public access to more than a hundred million patent documents from over ninety countries, including the full specification and drawings for each. Every invention listed in Senserity links to its Espacenet record so the underlying filing can be read and verified independently.
- European Patent Office
The patent authority whose database Senserity searches for registered patents.
The EPO grants European patents and publishes patent data through Espacenet and its Open Patent Services API. Senserity searches it by applicant name for UK, European and international filings made in a company's own name. The data is free to use and patent information is available on every plan, including the free tier.
- Gazette notice
A formal public notice published in the official Gazette.
The London, Edinburgh and Belfast Gazettes are the UK's official journals of record. Insolvency events, strike-off proposals, appointments of liquidators and administrators, and other statutory notices are published there. Senserity ingests the Gazette feed to track corporate events as they happen.
- Gender Pay Gap
Mandatory reporting of pay differences between men and women.
UK employers with 250 or more employees must publish gender pay gap figures annually, covering mean and median hourly pay gaps, bonus gaps, and the proportion of men and women in each pay quartile. Reports are submitted to a government service and made publicly available.
- granted patent
A patent application that has been examined and approved.
A patent application is published around eighteen months after filing, but is not enforceable until a patent office has examined it and granted it. An application awaiting a decision may still be refused or withdrawn. A portfolio weighted towards granted patents represents established protection, while recent applications suggest active ongoing development.
- health score
A 0–100 score where higher is better — used at the test level.
Individual insight tests (Phase A, B, and C) report results on a health scale: 100 means healthy, 0 means concerning. Category scores and the overall score invert this at aggregation time so that risk scores follow the convention of higher-is-worse.
- HSE
The Health and Safety Executive — UK workplace safety regulator.
The HSE enforces health-and-safety law in Great Britain. It publishes enforcement notices, prosecutions, and fatalities data. Senserity matches these records against watchlisted companies to flag serious workplace incidents and enforcement history.
- IASME
The national certification body that runs Cyber Essentials in the UK.
IASME is the sole Cyber Essentials partner for the NCSC. It also offers its own IASME Cyber Assurance scheme, a broader information assurance framework aligned with ISO 27001. Senserity verifies Cyber Essentials and IASME certifications directly against the IASME register.
- ICO registration
Registration with the UK data protection regulator.
Most UK organisations that process personal data must pay an annual data protection fee to the Information Commissioner's Office. The ICO publishes the register of fee-payers, showing the data controller's name, public register entry, tier, and renewal date. Unregistered data controllers risk enforcement action.
- in liquidation
Formal wind-up — assets are being realised to pay creditors.
Liquidation is the process of bringing a company to an end by selling its assets, paying creditors in a statutory order, and distributing any surplus to shareholders. It can be voluntary (initiated by the company) or compulsory (court-ordered, usually on a creditor's petition). A liquidator is appointed to run the process.
- insight test
One of the individual checks Senserity runs against a company.
Each insight test evaluates a single aspect of a company — a late filing, a sanctions hit, a PSC gap, an SSL certificate expiry, and so on. Tests have a code (e.g. FIN-034), a severity, a display type, and belong to one of the nine risk categories. There are several hundred, and the full catalogue with the current count is published at /help/reference/test-catalogue.
- IPC classification
A worldwide scheme classifying every patent by field of technology.
The International Patent Classification is assigned by patent examiners and divides all inventions into eight broad areas, from everyday necessities and industrial machinery through to chemistry, instruments and electronics. Senserity uses it to show the fields in which a company develops new products, which helps verify that claimed technical capabilities match what the business has actually protected.
- ISO 27001
The international standard for information security management systems.
ISO/IEC 27001 specifies requirements for establishing, implementing, maintaining, and continually improving an information security management system (ISMS). Certification is issued by accredited bodies following an independent audit and is typically valid for three years with annual surveillance.
- Madrid system
A treaty letting one application register a trade mark in many countries.
Administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization, the Madrid system lets an owner file once and designate any of its member countries, rather than applying separately in each. Senserity searches these international registrations alongside the UK and EU registers. A mark held across all three points to a business trading or licensing beyond the UK, since the cost and renewal fees are rarely justified otherwise.
- Modern Slavery Act
UK law requiring a public statement on supply-chain slavery risk.
Section 54 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 requires commercial organisations operating in the UK with an annual turnover of £36m or more to publish an annual slavery-and-human-trafficking statement. Senserity checks the government's Modern Slavery Statement Registry for in-scope companies.
- mortgage (company)
A form of charge where property secures a loan to the company.
In a company-law context, a mortgage is a type of charge over property (typically real estate or other tangible assets). The lender retains a legal interest until the debt is repaid. Registered at Companies House like any other charge. Senserity distinguishes between outstanding mortgages and those that have been satisfied or released.
- National Archives case law
The official online archive of UK court judgments.
Find Case Law (caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk) publishes the judgments and decisions of UK courts and tribunals. Senserity searches the archive for named companies and their officers to surface litigation, uses Claude to summarise relevant judgments, and classifies them by subject matter.
- Nice classification
The international scheme grouping goods and services into 45 numbered classes.
Every trade mark is registered for specific classes rather than for everything: classes 1 to 34 cover goods and 35 to 45 cover services. Protection only extends to the classes claimed, so the classes on a mark show which products or services the brand actually covers. Senserity lists them so a reader can see whether a company's registrations match what it sells.
- operating centre
An approved base where an operator's vehicles are normally kept.
Every operating centre must be specified on the licence and approved by the Traffic Commissioner, who considers whether it is suitable and large enough and may hear objections from neighbours. Most operators run from a single centre, so multiple centres indicate geographic resilience: work can move between depots if one becomes unavailable.
- operator licence
The licence required to run lorries or buses commercially in Great Britain.
Anyone operating goods vehicles over 3.5 tonnes, or vehicles carrying passengers for hire, must hold an operator licence issued by the Traffic Commissioner for their traffic area. A licence sets the maximum number of vehicles and trailers the operator may run and names the approved operating centres. It is granted only on proof of good repute, financial standing and professional competence, so holding one is independent evidence of operating scale. Northern Ireland is licensed separately by the Transport Regulation Unit.
- OSCR
The Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator.
OSCR is the independent regulator for Scottish charities. It maintains the Scottish Charity Register and publishes trustees, accounts, and regulatory decisions. Senserity ingests OSCR data alongside the CCEW register so charity links are captured across the whole UK.
- patent
A legal right protecting an invention for a limited period.
A patent gives its holder the right to stop others making, using or selling an invention, usually for up to twenty years from the date of filing. Patents must be applied for in each territory where protection is wanted, and renewal fees are payable to keep them in force. Holding patents indicates investment in product or process development; most companies hold none, and their absence is not a negative finding.
- patent family
One invention, counted once however many countries it is filed in.
Protecting a single invention in several countries produces a separate published document in each, all describing the same underlying idea. These related documents form a patent family. Senserity counts families rather than documents, so a company that protected four inventions worldwide is shown as holding four, not forty. This avoids overstating a portfolio.
- PSC
Person with Significant Control.
An individual or corporate entity that owns more than 25% of a company's shares or voting rights, has the right to appoint or remove the majority of directors, or otherwise has significant influence or control. UK companies must report their PSCs to Companies House and keep a PSC register.
- Red Flag
A finding we think you should look at first, regardless of score.
Red Flags are the highest-priority findings — typically critical-severity failures on high-confidence tests. They are shown at the top of every company profile, independently of the numerical score, so that a single catastrophic finding doesn't get buried by otherwise-good signals.
- registered office
The official address to which legal documents are sent.
Every UK company must have a registered office in the part of the UK where it is incorporated (England and Wales, Scotland, or Northern Ireland). It is the public address on Companies House, used for serving legal documents. Frequent changes to the registered office can be an indicator worth reviewing.
- report
A PDF due diligence document generated from a company's insights.
Reports capture a point-in-time snapshot of a company's risk profile as a branded PDF, suitable for sharing with stakeholders or storing as a procurement record. Six report types are available — supplier, customer, acquisition, competitor, partner, and self-assessment — each with a different default section configuration.
- Restricted licence
An operator licence permitting carriage of the operator's own goods only.
A Restricted licence allows a business to carry its own goods in connection with its trade, but not to carry goods for other people for hire or reward. Builders' merchants, farms and manufacturers commonly hold one. It requires no transport manager. A supplier offering haulage services to third parties on a Restricted licence would be operating outside its terms, which is why Senserity reports licence type rather than simply whether a licence exists.
- risk grade
The A–E letter grade derived from the overall risk score.
A convenience mapping of DRV-055 onto an A–E scale for at-a-glance comparison. A is lowest risk; E is highest. The exact score thresholds are set by the DRV-065 derived test. Use the grade for summary displays and the raw score for detailed comparison.
- risk score
A 0–100 score where higher is worse — used at category and overall level.
Category scores (DRV-056 to DRV-064) and the overall score (DRV-055) are reported on a risk scale: 0 means no identified risk, 100 means maximum risk. The inversion from the test-level health scale happens inside the scoring pipeline, not inside individual tests.
- severity
How much weight a failed test contributes to the category score.
Every test result is tagged with a severity: critical, high, medium, low, or info. When a test fails, its contribution to the category score is multiplied by a severity factor — 17 for critical, 8 for high, 4 for medium, 1 for low, 0 for info. Info-level failures therefore appear in reports but do not affect the numerical score.
- shadow director
A person whose instructions the directors customarily follow.
Not formally appointed, but the board routinely acts on their directions. Shadow directors carry most of the same legal duties as formal directors and can be held liable for misconduct. Often a concern in corporate governance reviews and in understanding true control of a company.
- SIC code
A 5-digit code classifying a company's business activity.
The UK Standard Industrial Classification (SIC 2007) assigns each business activity a 5-digit code. Companies report up to four SIC codes at Companies House. Senserity uses SIC codes to apply sector-appropriate risk tests and to identify which regulatory regimes a company is likely subject to.
- SSIP
Safety Schemes in Procurement — health-and-safety pre-qualification.
SSIP is a mutual recognition umbrella for UK health-and-safety assessment schemes (CHAS, Acclaim, SafeContractor, and many others). A single SSIP-accredited certificate is accepted by all member schemes, reducing duplication in supply-chain compliance. Senserity checks SSIP member-scheme registers directly.
- Standard licence
An operator licence permitting carriage of goods or passengers for other people.
A Standard licence is required to carry goods or passengers for hire or reward, and comes in National and International variants depending on whether the operator works beyond the UK. Unlike a Restricted licence it must name a professionally qualified transport manager who exercises continuous and effective management of the fleet. That requirement is a condition of the licence rather than a matter of good practice.
- termination
A director or secretary leaving or being removed from a company.
Officer terminations (resignations or removals) must be notified to Companies House within 14 days. A cluster of terminations at short notice is a governance signal Senserity flags, especially when coupled with other indicators such as late filings or strike-off notices.
- test coverage
The proportion of applicable tests that actually ran for a company.
Not every test applies to every company — some require specific data sources (e.g. audited accounts) or sector context. Test coverage reports how many of the applicable tests had sufficient data to produce a result. Low coverage is a caveat to attach to the category score, not an error.
- topup
Extra credits purchased outside your plan — they never expire.
Topup credits sit alongside your monthly allowance. Monthly credits are consumed first; topups fill the gap. Unlike monthly credits, topup balance rolls over indefinitely — useful for absorbing a burst of on-demand actions without upgrading your plan.
- trade mark
A registered sign identifying goods or services as coming from one business.
A trade mark protects a brand identifier — a name, logo, slogan or combination of these — and gives its owner the right to stop others using a confusingly similar sign for similar goods or services. Registration lasts ten years and can be renewed indefinitely. Registering signals a brand the business considers worth defending; most companies register none, and their absence is not a negative finding.
- traffic area
One of the eight regions Great Britain is divided into for operator licensing.
An operator must hold a licence for each traffic area it keeps vehicles in, so a haulier with depots around the country will hold several licences rather than one. The eight areas are the East of England, London and the South East, the North East, the North West, Scotland, Wales, the West Midlands and the West of England. Counting an operator's licences therefore tells you about geographic reach, not about how many separate permissions it needed to obtain.
- Traffic Commissioner
The independent regulator of commercial vehicle operators in Great Britain.
Traffic Commissioners licence goods and public service vehicle operators, register local bus services and act on operator conduct. Great Britain is divided into eight traffic areas, each with its own Commissioner. They may call an operator to a public inquiry and, where standards are not met, curtail, suspend or revoke a licence, or disqualify those running it. The register is published weekly by DVSA on their behalf.
- transport manager
The qualified person responsible for a Standard licence holder's fleet.
A transport manager holds a Certificate of Professional Competence and is named on the licence as continuously and effectively managing the operator's vehicles — maintenance, drivers' hours, roadworthiness and record keeping. Every Standard licence must have one. A Standard licence showing none is a gap in a statutory condition, and is something a Traffic Commissioner can act on.
- UBO
Ultimate Beneficial Owner.
The natural person at the top of an ownership chain who ultimately owns or controls an entity — typically defined as holding more than 25% of shares or voting rights through any chain of ownership. In the UK, the PSC register is the primary mechanism for identifying UBOs for the purposes of anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance.
- UK Intellectual Property Office
The government body that maintains the UK register of trade marks and patents.
The UK IPO grants and records registered trade marks, patents and designs, and publishes the register free of charge. Senserity searches it by owner name alongside the EU register and international registrations, and links each UK-registered mark to its entry on the official register so the record can be verified independently. Trade mark information is available on every plan, including the free tier.
- watchlist
Your set of companies that Senserity actively monitors.
The watchlist is the starting point for most Senserity workflows. Adding a company queues it for enrichment and opens it up for risk scoring, alerting, and reporting. Your plan sets a maximum watchlist size; companies beyond that limit can be paused, not deleted.
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