What can you actually verify about a new supplier?
A Supplier Check is the Digital Trust Audit pointed at a company you are considering doing business with rather than at your own. Eleven areas, each checked against a live source, every finding flagged, and an explicit separation between what was verified, what contradicts itself, and what could not be established at all. £450 plus VAT.
What a credit check does not tell you
A credit report tells you whether a company pays. It does not tell you whether the company on the invoice is the company on the website, whether the accreditations in the pitch deck are current on the registers that issued them, whether the domain sending you payment instructions can be impersonated, or whether the trading name you have been dealing with resolves to the legal entity you are about to contract with.
Those are different questions, they are answerable from public sources, and almost nobody asks them at onboarding.
The eleven areas, applied to them
Company record — the registered name, number, registered office and filing status, and whether the address itself tells a checker anything.
One business or several — whether the trading names, brands and legal entities a visitor encounters resolve to the company they think they are dealing with.
Machine-readability — whether the site states, in a form a machine can extract, what the business is, where it is and what it sells.
Navigability — whether a visitor and a crawler can reach everything the business claims to publish.
Email authentication — SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and whether the domain can be impersonated.
Contactability and identification — whether the published contact routes reach the business, and whether the business is identifiable from them.
Proof — whether case studies, figures and claimed accreditations reconcile against the registers that issue them.
Presence away from the site — what independent sources say, and whether they agree with the site.
Domain ownership — who holds the domain, how it renews, and how close it is to expiry.
Legal pages and company particulars — whether the statutory disclosures are present and name the correct entity.
Accessibility — conformance against the published standard, checked rather than fixed.
The assessment is the same one this body applies to its own clients, run from outside with no contact with the supplier and nothing requested from them. You do not need their permission and they need not know.
What the report gives a procurement reader
Verified. Facts checked against a live source, with the source and the date.
Inconsistent. Where the company's own statements contradict each other or the public record — a mismatched registered office, a trading name that resolves to a different entity, a claimed certification that is not on the issuing register.
Could not be established. What is not answerable from outside, framed as questions to put to the supplier directly, with a note of who is likely to hold each answer.
That last section is the one that earns its keep in a pre-qualification questionnaire: it converts an incomplete picture into a short, specific list of things to ask, rather than a generic form the supplier fills in themselves.
What this is not
It is not a credit check, an identity verification service, a sanctions or politically-exposed-person screen, or a judgement about whether to contract. It reports what can be verified from outside on a stated date, and it makes no recommendation.
It is also not a statutory check. Companies House identity verification proves that a named person’s identity was verified. It does not prove that a business is what it says it is, and the difference is worth understanding before you rely on either → UK CertifID explained
What it costs
£450 plus VAT per supplier. Volume terms for onboarding programmes of ten suppliers or more are quoted on the same published basis — a flat fee per check, never a fee linked to what the check finds.
The criteria are in the published standard, and every published figure is on the pricing page.
Requesting a Supplier Check
Send an email from your business address to audit@digitaltrustaudit.co.uk and include:
- The company’s registered name and its website address.
- The name and role of the person who can answer questions about the company’s records.
- Confirmation that you are authorised to request an assessment of this business.
- Your usual email signature, unchanged.
We reply within one working day with the scope, the fee and what happens next.
Email audit@digitaltrustaudit.co.ukQuestions
Know what you can verify before you sign.
Eleven areas, checked from outside, reported for a procurement reader.
Request a Supplier Check