Certificates can be issued to organisations. Once a certificate has been issued to an organisation, an organisation profile page is created on which public certificates are displayed, along with other details.
Organisation names should be listed as they appear in an official register or as incorporated, for example My Company Ltd. The organisation name is limited to 150 characters.
If you have a very long organisation name close to the permitted limit which includes punctuation or special characters like &, because of the way API requests handle the data (by 'escaping' the characters) you may find the character limit is exceeded.
Companies may also have a trading name. These too can be added to the organisation profile on the platform.
It is important to have the organisation name and any trading alias correctly entered in the profile so that certificates issued have matching details. If there is a typo in the profile or on a certificate, a name mismatch may be flagged.
Organisations have a unique alphanumeric ‘number’ based on their country and type. This identifier is used as the organisation’s profile page slug. There are a number of different organisation types.
| Description | Short code | Number requirements |
|---|---|---|
| Limited Company (Ltd or PLC) | LTD | Yes, alphanumeric*, UK: 8 digits** |
| Limited Liability Partnership (LLP) | LLP | Yes, alphanumeric*, UK: 8 digits** |
| Community Interest Company (CIC) | CIC | Yes, alphanumeric*, UK: 8 digits** |
| Cooperative | COP | Yes, alphanumeric* |
| Other Registered Mutual (Community Benefit Society, Credit Union, Building Society, Friendly Society) | MTL | Yes, alphanumeric* |
| Registered Charity | CHA | Yes, alphanumeric* |
| Government Agency or Public Body | GOV | Random number by system*** |
| Sole Trader | SOL | Random number by system*** |
| Other Partnership | PRT | Random number by system*** |
| Other Club/Society | SOC | Random number by system*** |
| Other Organisation | OTH | Random number by system*** |
*Letters of the alphabet (a-z) and numbers (0-9) only. Must contain at least one number and must not contain any other characters or spaces. Max length is 20 characters. Lower case is automatically converted to upper case.
**To correspond with Companies House numbering of an optional two letter prefix (like SC) and a six or eight digit number with leading zeros.
***If a subsequent certificate is issued to the same organisation type, country, name and email address, the existing organisation number will be used. Otherwise a new random number is assigned and these organisations will need to be merged. On request, we can also manually assign these organisations a particular number, if for example a public registration number exists.
Certificates are issued to organisations based on their unique number. This ensures that certificates issued to the same organisation end up on the same organisation profile page and account, irrespective of the email address used.
Sometimes organisation numbers have a BM prefix. This indicates we have assigned the number to avoid a conflict.
Finding the unique number for an organisation can be problematic in some territories. We outline some recommended resources below.
Around the UK...
When creating an organisation (or issuing a certificate to one), our country drop-down list has 'United Kingdom' which should be used for Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This gives 'GB' to the organisation reference code. There are also separate entries in the list for Jersey (JE), Guernsey (GG) and the Isle of Man (IM).
Further afield...
Because these are 21 digits, we currently recommend dropping the leading U or L to fit our 20 digit limit. We are reviewing how to relax this limitation.
We're busy compiling and updating more entries to this list, but in the meantime, the following is helpful: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/overseas-registries/overseas-registries