Changing a residential address on Inform Direct is quick and easy. If the individual is a PSC and Director within the same company then Inform Direct will update both records.

If you need to change or add the Residential Address for a Director follow these simple steps:

1. Find the individual within Inform Direct listed under the Officers or PSC tab

2. Click on the yellow pencil and select 'Edit Personal Details'

3. This will take you to the Edit screen, you will need to enter a Date of change and select Find / enter address in the residential address section highlighted below. Here you can enter the new residential address.

Note: you can select any previously entered address, please see How do I select a Previously Entered Address?

4. Once you have entered the correct residential address Click 'Continue' to proceed

Note: The residential address cannot be a business address. If there is a word like, 'Unit,' 'Office,' 'Suite,' or 'Industrial,' then you will see an error message.

5. Inform Direct will identify whether the address which you are changing from is used elsewhere in your portfolio of companies. It will identify exact matches and similar address, if any are located it will allow you the chance to update them all in bulk. For full details, see How to change addresses in bulk

6. Before submitting the change to Companies House there is an opportunity to produce a summary document, this can be used to get approval before making the submission. Selecting Yes will take you through the process to create the approval document. How do I prepare draft documents to change the details of an officer or PSC?

Selecting No does not create the summary document and proceeds to the next step below.

Note: The approval document feature is only available to subscribers to the software. What are the benefits of subscribing to Inform Direct?

6. Inform Direct will then make an electronic submission to Companies House to advise them of the change to the address filing the relevant form i.e. CH01 for the director and/or PSC04 for the PSC What Confirmation is There That a Submission to Companies House Has Been Successful?

7. The final step will allow you to generate any necessary supporting documents - you will just need to ensure you tick the box alongside those that you require.

To check if the residential address has been updated, once you have submitted the change.
Go to the Recent Activity section for your company and check that the residential address change submission is marked as “Complete.” This confirms Companies House has processed the update.

What if Companies House rejects the change and asks for evidence of authority to use the address?

Companies House will sometimes reject a director's or PSC's address submission and ask for evidence that the individual has authority to use the address given (for example, where it isn't obviously their own home address). Companies House do not accept this evidence electronically — it can only be submitted alongside a paper PSC04 form, sent to them by post.

If this happens, you'll need to complete a paper PSC04 form and post it to Companies House together with the requested evidence. Inform Direct is not able to submit this evidence, or the paper PSC04, electronically on your behalf — this part of the process has to be done directly with Companies House.

Why would Companies House reject my change citing a different field (e.g. country) to the one I actually changed?

When you submit any address change for an officer or PSC, Companies House checks their whole residential address record, not just the field you've edited. If another part of that record was already incomplete — for example, the county is missing, which is a mandatory field — Companies House can reject the whole submission, and the rejection message may point to a field that looks unconnected to the change you actually made.

If this happens: check the individual's full residential address in Inform Direct for any missing mandatory fields (county is a common culprit), complete it, and resubmit. This isn't a case of Inform Direct displaying different information to what Companies House holds — it's Companies House validating the complete record whenever any part of it is resubmitted.

Can a Companies House default service address block a residential address change?

Yes. If a director's or secretary's service address is currently a Companies House default, Companies House can reject other address changes for that person until it's resolved — including a residential address change, or an attempt to set the service address to the company's registered office (which may itself be rejected on the grounds that the individual isn't entitled to use that address).

This can affect the residential address, the service address, and an attempted registered-office service address together. It does not affect the shareholder contact address — shareholders don't have a service address in the same sense, since a shareholder's address is never shown on the public register in the first place.

As above, this typically needs to be resolved via the paper PSC04 route with evidence of address, rather than electronically through Inform Direct. See How do I edit a Director or Secretary's Service address? for the service address side of this.

I get an error that the new address is the same as the old one when I correct an address. What can I do?

Inform Direct only treats a change as a new address if the postcode itself changes. If the postcode stays the same, for example when you only correct its capitalisation (lowercase to uppercase) or spacing, or fix other details of the address, the system sees no change and the normal edit won't go through.

Contact the support team at support@informdirect.co.uk with the company number and the person's name. Our tech team will temporarily change the postcode to something different. Once we confirm this has been done, you can edit the address again and enter the correct details, including the postcode in capitals.