Terms of Service

Last updated: 24 October 2026 · Version: 1.0

1. Who we are

Biz History Check is a trading name of Smudgestone Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 12756947), registered office Chatterton House, Little Catterton Lane, Islington, Tadcaster, England, LS24 8EA. ICO registration number: ZC282460. Contact: [email protected].

"We", "us" and "our" mean Smudgestone Ltd. "You" means the person or business that places the order.

2. What these terms cover

These terms apply to every order on our website, including the free teaser and the agent plan. By placing an order you agree to them. If you buy as a consumer (for purposes mainly outside your trade, business or profession), some sections apply to you differently; we say where. The agent plan is for business customers only.

3. What we provide

We prepare "history check" reports on small businesses offered for sale in England and Wales, such as pubs, cafés and shops. A report summarises what we find in publicly available sources, which may include Companies House, The Gazette, Food Standards Agency hygiene ratings, local authority licensing and planning registers, the Valuation Office Agency, online reviews and social media, plus anything you send us (adverts, screenshots, brochures and documents).

Reports are drafted with the help of AI software and reviewed by a person before they are sent. We do not contact the seller, the agent, staff, the landlord or the council on your behalf. We only buy paid searches (for example HM Land Registry titles) with your agreement, and we don't charge you for a paid search until its result has been delivered to you.

For the purposes of consumer law, we treat a report as a service that we perform for you and deliver by email and private link.

Products

VAT: We are not currently VAT-registered, so no VAT is charged on the prices shown. Delivery times are estimates, not guarantees. The total price, delivery time and your cancellation rights are shown on the order page before you pay.

3A. Agent plan (business customers only)

1. Who it's for. Our trade options (Pay-As-You-Go Trade Account, Buyer Referral Partner programme and the Monthly Agency Partner Plan) are only available to businesses and professional practices (for example business transfer agents, commercial property brokers, solicitors and accountants). Trade rates and referral commission terms are set out in our confidential Broker Trade Rate Card and confirmed in your order confirmation. By ordering or signing up you confirm you are acting for business purposes.
2. Agency Partner Plan price and what's included. The monthly fee and the number of included Pre-Marketing Seller Checks each calendar month (together with the trade rate for any extra checks above your monthly allowance) are as set out in your Trade Rate Card and order confirmation.
3. Payment and renewal. Payment for the monthly plan is taken monthly in advance by Stripe. The plan renews automatically each month until you cancel.
4. Unused reports. Unused monthly reports do not roll over to the next month.
5. Cancelling. You can cancel at any time by emailing [email protected]. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current monthly period; no further payments are taken and the reports for that month remain available until it ends.
6. Vendor consent. For pre-marketing checks on a vendor's business, you confirm you have the vendor's agreement to the check before you order it.
7. Price and terms changes. We will give you at least 30 days' notice by email of any price increase or material change to the plan. If you don't accept the change, you can cancel before it takes effect without any charge for the changed terms.
8. White-label reports. Reports supplied under the plan may carry your branding. Section 9.2 applies: they are for you and the buyers or vendors you share them with for the purpose of the sale, and we owe no duty to anyone else unless we agree otherwise in writing.

4. What a report is not

• A report is an information summary. It is not legal, financial, tax, accounting, surveying or valuation advice, and not a RICS valuation.
• Any value range is an estimate based on limited public information and stated assumptions. It is not a valuation and must not be used as one, including for lending.
• A report is accurate only as at the date of the check shown on it. Registers can be out of date, incomplete or offline, and things can change after we check.
• "Not found" means we searched and found nothing. It does not mean "all clear".
• Where an advert hides the business's name, identifying it is a judgement. We state a confidence level. A flagged pattern is not proof of wrongdoing.
• You should always get advice from a solicitor and an accountant before making an offer or committing money.

4A. If a source is unavailable

If an official register or public source is temporarily offline when we run your check, we never treat it as "nothing found", and we never hold up your report.

• Immediate delivery & automatic follow-on: We deliver your report straight away with every available check completed, clearly marking any temporarily offline source as not yet checked with the date and time we tried. As soon as that register or site is back online, we re-run the missing check and send you an updated follow-on report automatically at no extra cost.
• Your choice of remedy: If a source remains offline for more than 24 hours, you can either wait for the automatic free follow-on update (within 14 days) or request a partial refund of £10 per missing source. If a major source (such as Companies House, The Gazette or the local licensing register) stays down for more than 14 days so that we cannot complete the follow-on check, you can choose a full refund.
• Paid searches (such as HM Land Registry titles) are not charged unless and until their result is delivered.

5. Your order and payment

1. Steps to order. You enter the advert or business details, confirm the business we've matched, choose any paid searches, enter your email, tick the required boxes and pay.
2. Correcting mistakes. You can go back and change any details before you press "Place order". If you spot a mistake afterwards, email us straight away and we'll correct it if we haven't started.
3. Payment. Payments are taken by Stripe when you place your order.
4. When the contract is made. A contract is formed when we email you an order confirmation. We may decline an order; if we do, we will refund everything you paid in full within 14 days.

6. "Business not identified"

If we cannot identify the business with reasonable confidence, we will send you a provisional result and ask for more information (such as the address or the full brochure). We will re-run the check once at no extra cost when you send it. If you do not send the information within 14 days, you can choose a full refund or a credit for a future report.

7. Your right to cancel (consumers)

If you are a consumer, the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 normally give you 14 days from the contract date to cancel a service contract.

Because reports are usually delivered within 24 hours, we will only start within the 14 days if you expressly ask us to by ticking a separate, unticked box at checkout. That box says:

"I ask Biz History Check to start my report straight away. I understand I will lose my right to cancel once the report has been fully delivered, and that if I cancel before then I may have to pay for work already done."

We repeat this in your order confirmation email.

This means:

• If you cancel before we start, you get a full refund.
• If you cancel after we start but before delivery, we may keep a proportionate amount for the work done and refund the rest.
• Once the report is fully delivered, you lose your right to cancel.
• For the 3-pack, each report is treated separately: the right is lost for each report once it is delivered; unused reports can be cancelled within the 14 days.
• For the full buyer pack, the right is lost only once the whole pack is delivered.

How the proportionate amount is worked out. It is a fair share of the total price for the work done before you told us you were cancelling. As a guide: identifying the business and completing the source checks, but not yet drafting the report: 50% of the price; report drafted but not yet reviewed and sent: 85% of the price.

To cancel, email [email protected] with your order number. A model cancellation form is in our Refund and Cancellation Policy.

8. Refunds

See our Refund and Cancellation Policy. In short: a full refund if we cannot deliver; a fix or refund if a report contains a material error of fact on our part; the source-down remedies in section 4A; otherwise no refund once a report is delivered. This does not affect your legal rights, including your rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015.

9. Our responsibility to you

9.1 We will provide the service with reasonable care and skill, as the Consumer Rights Act 2015 requires.

9.2 Who can rely on the report. The report is for you only, for deciding whether to buy (or, for agents, to market) the business named in it. You may share it with your own professional advisers and lender, but nobody else may rely on it, and we owe no duty to anyone else.

9.3 Business customers. If you are a business customer, subject to 9.5, our total liability to you arising from any order is limited to the greater of the fee you paid for that order and £500.

9.4 Consumers. If you are a consumer, we are responsible for loss you suffer that is a foreseeable result of our breach of these terms or our failure to use reasonable care and skill. We are not responsible for losses arising from your decision to buy or not buy a business, which remains your decision, taken on your own professional advice.

9.5 Nothing in these terms excludes or limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot be excluded or limited by law, including your statutory rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015. Any limit on business customers applies only so far as it is reasonable under the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977.

9.6 If you are a business customer, subject to 9.5, we are not liable for loss of profit, loss of business, loss of opportunity, or wasted expenditure such as professional fees.

9.7 We are not responsible for errors in the public sources themselves, for information you give us, or for decisions you make, though we will tell you about any source problems we spot.

9.8 Insurance. We hold Professional Indemnity and Cyber & Data insurance with Hiscox Underwriting Ltd. Details and certificate copies are available on request from [email protected].

10. Acceptable use

You must not:

• use a report to harass, threaten or defame anyone, or publish it;
• resell, republish or share a report outside section 9.2;
• upload anything you have no right to share, or anything unlawful or malicious;
• use the site to scrape, overload or attack our systems;
• use the service to profile an individual rather than to assess a business for sale.

We may suspend the service or refuse orders if these rules are broken.

11. Intellectual property

We (or our licensors) own the copyright in our reports, website and methods. When you pay, we give you a personal, non-transferable licence to use your report as set out in 9.2. Public-sector information in reports is used under the Open Government Licence where it applies, and third-party content stays owned by its owners. You keep ownership of what you upload and give us permission to use it to produce your report.

12. Your information and strict confidentiality of uploaded documents

How we handle personal data is set out in our Privacy Notice. Cookies are covered in our Cookie Notice.

Contractual confidentiality & non-disclosure undertaking (Full Buyer Pack documents):

• Strict duty of confidence: Any non-public seller or transaction documents that you or your professional adviser provide to us (including trading or management accounts, VAT returns, draft or copy leases, heads of terms, and commercial contracts) are held by Smudgestone Ltd under a strict contractual duty of confidentiality and non-disclosure.
• Sole purpose: We use those documents solely to prepare your confidential report and solicitor/accountant question list for that specific transaction. We never publish, share, or disclose them to any third party, and we never use confidential client documents to train public AI models.
• Automatic 30-day deletion: All uploaded Buyer Pack documents are permanently deleted within 30 days of report delivery, or earlier at any time if you or your professional adviser email [email protected] asking us to delete them immediately.

13. Events outside our control

We are not responsible for delays caused by things outside our reasonable control, such as a register being offline. Section 4A explains what we do if a source is down. If any other delay is long, we will tell you and offer a refund.

14. Changes

We may update these terms. The version in force when you order applies to that order. For the agent plan, we will give at least 30 days' notice by email of any change, and you can cancel without charge before it takes effect if you don't accept it (see section 3A).

15. Complaints

Email [email protected] or write to us at the registered office above. We aim to reply within 5 working days. We are not obliged to use an alternative dispute resolution (ADR) scheme, but if you're not happy with our response you can also contact the Citizens Advice consumer service (citizensadvice.org.uk, 0808 223 1133).

16. Law and courts

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales. The courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction, but if you are a consumer living in Scotland or Northern Ireland you may also bring proceedings there.