Verifying your business
Before the first tracking number on a paid account, we ask for your business name, your registered address and what you are going to use the number for. Most limited companies are verified on the spot: we check what you typed against your Companies House record, and if it matches you can buy a number straight away — that one, and every one after it. Where we cannot confirm it automatically, a person here checks it instead. It is asked once per account.
Nothing is asked of a free account. The free plan includes no tracking number, so there is nothing to provision and no reason for us to hold your registered address. The form appears when you go to buy your first number, not when you sign up.
Why it is asked at all
UK telephone numbers are regulated, and the carrier that issues them requires the business behind a number to be identified before it is created. That is not a Proofbell policy we could waive: attempting the purchase without it fails at the carrier with an opaque error, which is a worse experience than asking you for four fields.
It also protects you. Tracking numbers are attractive to fraud — a number pointed at a premium-rate destination is somebody else's invoice — and a service that hands them out to anonymous accounts ends up with a reputation that affects every customer's calls.
What we ask for
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Business name | The legal name — the one on your registration or, if you are a sole trader, your own. |
| Company number | Optional, because a sole trader has none — but it is the field that gets you verified instantly, because it is the one Companies House can be asked about. Please leave it empty rather than typing "N/A": an absent value is honest, and a placeholder is indistinguishable from a real one in everything that reads the field afterwards. |
| VAT number | Offered only when you have no company number, and optional then. If you give one we check it against HMRC's public VAT lookup, which is the automatic route open to a sole trader or a partnership. Not VAT registered? Leave it blank — a person checks your details instead, which is slower and not worse. |
| Registered address | Up to four lines. Where the business is registered, not necessarily where it trades. |
| Postcode | A UK postcode in the ordinary format, such as GL50 1SU. It is also what the numbers page uses to guess which dialling code to show you first — see below. |
| What the number is for | A sentence or two, at least ten characters. "Tracking calls from our Google Ads for a plumbing business in Cheltenham" is exactly the right amount of detail. |
There is no document to upload. No passport, no utility bill, no certificate of incorporation. Storing identity documents is a materially different commitment — encryption at rest, its own retention rule, its own deletion path — and we have not built it, so we do not ask for it. What is above is what the carrier's regulatory bundle for a UK local number needs.
What happens to it
- It is held against your account and used to verify you and to register numbers with the carrier. It is not used for marketing and it is not in the warehouse export.
- The submission and the decision are both written to your audit log, with the name of whoever made them — including the member of our staff who approved or refused it. A compliance decision about your business that you cannot see is not a decision you can challenge.
- The audit entry records which fields were submitted, not their values, so your registered address is not copied into a second table with a different retention rule.
How it is checked
There are three routes through, and which one you take is decided the moment you press submit. You are told which happened on the page, not by email an hour later.
| If you are | What happens |
|---|---|
| A limited company | We look your company number up at Companies House and compare the registered name and the registered office postcode with what you typed. If they match, you are approved immediately and can buy a number without waiting for anybody. If they do not, the submission is held for a person and the mismatch is the reason recorded — so it is worth copying the postcode from your Companies House record rather than from memory. |
| A sole trader or partnership with a VAT number | There is no register of sole traders to check, so we use HMRC's public VAT lookup instead: give your VAT number and, if HMRC confirms it against the name and address you gave, you are approved on the spot in the same way. |
| Anybody else | No company number and no VAT number, or a check that did not agree: the submission goes to a person here, who checks it the same working day. You are told that is what happened, and why, rather than being left to guess which of the three you got. |
If your registered office is not where you trade, give the registered office postcode. This is the commonest reason an otherwise fine submission gets held. Plenty of companies are registered at their accountant's address and work from somewhere else, and Companies House knows only the first one — so a submission with the trading postcode on it cannot match, and waits for a person who will approve it anyway. Put the registered address in the form; where you actually work makes no difference to the number you get. (The one thing it does affect is which dialling code the numbers page offers you first — see below, and change it if it is wrong.)
The four states you can be in
| State | What it means, and what to do |
|---|---|
| Not submitted | Needed before your first tracking number. Fill in the form on your numbers page. This is where every paid account starts. |
| With us for checking | Submitted, and either we could not check it automatically or the check did not agree — so it is waiting on a person. Usually the same working day. The page tells you which of those it was. You get an email when it is done, and nothing else about your account is affected in the meantime — the tag keeps running and your reports keep working. |
| Verified | You can add tracking numbers, now and later. Nothing further is asked. This is where a matching Companies House or VAT check puts you within seconds of submitting. |
| Could not be verified | The reason is shown on your numbers page — a refusal with no reason is a support conversation nobody can resolve. Correct the details and submit again. If you think it is wrong, reply to the email and a person will look at it. |
We do not promise a turnaround on the ones a person checks. "Usually the same working day" is a description of what happens, not a commitment we have made — and it is worth knowing before you plan a campaign launch around it, because a paid account cannot self-serve its first number until the check is done. If you have a launch date and no company number, submit a few days before it rather than on the morning.
The automatic route is not a rubber stamp. Approving a legal entity for telephony because a form validated would be a control that approves everything, which is worse than none at all. What is automated is a comparison with a public register: the company number exists, the company is on it, and the name and registered office postcode agree with what was typed. Anything the register does not confirm is held for a person, which is more of them than you might expect — the register disagreeing is not an accusation, it is usually a moved office or an address typed from memory.
Two refusals that are easy to misread
- Submitting again while you are already in the queue is refused. It would put you back at the end of it. If you spotted a mistake after submitting, email us rather than resubmitting.
- Editing details that are already approved is refused too. Changing them would move the account back to "with us for checking", and since that is the state the number purchase gate reads, correcting a typo in your address would stop you adding numbers until somebody re-approved you. Email us and we will change them without interrupting anything.
Your postcode also picks the dialling code you see first
The numbers page browses rather than searching, and the area code it starts from is inferred from the postcode you give here. It is a guess and the page says so. Postcode areas and dialling codes are unrelated geographies that do not nest — GL covers Gloucester, Cheltenham and Stroud, which dial 01452, 01242 and 01453 — so check the code before you buy and change it if it is wrong. More on choosing a number.
Outside the UK
The form takes a country code and defaults to GB, and the postcode check expects a UK format. Numbers outside the UK are not something we provision self-serve today, so if you need one, talk to us rather than working around the form.