Company Intelligence Glossary

Company identity

Legal entity: The company or organisation identified in the relevant jurisdiction. Match it using registration details rather than relying on a brand name alone.
Registration number: An identifier issued by a registration authority. Preserve the jurisdiction alongside the number because numbers are not universally unique across countries.
Trading name: A name used in business that may differ from the registered legal name. It helps discovery but is not a substitute for the legal-entity identifier.
Entity resolution: The process of deciding which records refer to the same entity. Candidate matches should remain separate from confirmed matches.
Legal Entity Identifier (LEI): An identifier used in the Global LEI System. It can support entity matching but does not replace every local registration identifier.

Shareholder: A recorded holder of shares or an interest in a company. The holder may be an individual or another company.
Immediate parent: The entity directly above a company in the hierarchy defined by the dataset. Preserve the definition used by the source.
Domestic ultimate: The highest recorded group entity in the same country within the relevant corporate hierarchy.
Global ultimate: The highest recorded corporate entity worldwide in the group hierarchy. This field does not identify a natural-person beneficial owner.
Ultimate beneficial owner: A natural person who ultimately owns or controls an entity. Establishing that position requires sufficient ownership or control evidence and the applicable definition.
Subsidiary: A company controlled by another entity. A minority shareholding alone should not be relabelled as a subsidiary relationship without supporting evidence.
Indirect ownership: An interest held through one or more intermediate entities. Any calculation depends on the available percentages, paths and assumptions.
Corporate linkage: Structured relationships connecting legal entities, such as recorded parent and ultimate-parent links. It is distinct from a person-name match or a shared website.

Baseline: The saved successful record against which a later compatible record can be compared.
Change event: A recorded difference between comparable observations. A failed retrieval or an initial baseline is not automatically a business change.
Effective date: The date a recorded event takes effect, when provided by the source.
Filing date: The date a notice or document was filed. It may differ from the effective date and the date of retrieval.
Detection date: The date the monitoring process observed a record or change.
Data provenance: The information needed to trace a value or finding to the record and process that produced it.
Data lineage: The path data takes between systems and the transformations applied along the way.
Evidence gap: Information needed to support a conclusion that is unavailable, ambiguous or not yet verified.
Snapshot: A preserved capture of available information. A collected snapshot is not necessarily an original filing.

Reporting period: The period covered by financial results. Compare durations and period boundaries before comparing values.
Consolidated accounts: Financial statements reporting a group of entities together under the relevant accounting basis. Keep them separate from individual-company accounts.
Restatement: A revision to previously reported figures. Record which version is used in a comparison.
Reported value: A value present in the source record. Keep it distinguishable from an estimate or a value calculated by the analyst.
Review outcome: The documented conclusion and next step from the responsible reviewer. Approval does not itself confirm delivery to an external system.