Mandatory company info in emails and websites

From January 1st 2007 you need to ensure your company emails and websites have sufficient information to comply with the existing E-Commerce regulations and the Companies Act, and clarification brought about by the adoption of the EU First Company Law Amendment directive. Of course, much of this information is useful to your website visitors and business correspondents in any case, regardless of the fact that it is now mandatory.

As a minimum this should include:

• the company’s full legal name and trading names (eg “Bloggs Ltd trading as Bloggs the Decorators”)
• the jurisdiction of the company’s registration (eg “England and Wales”) and company number
• the registered office address, labelled as such (not just included as a correspondence address)
• VAT number if applicable

The simplest way to deal with email would be in the email footer or signature put on by every individual, but in a big organisation this is hard to audit properly, adds up to large amounts of staff time to maintain and wastes a lot of storage space when included on internal emails.

Alternatively use your email server (such as MS Exchange) to add a corporate-approved wording to the bottom of all mails, or program your email gateway (which might be a spam and anti-virus filter too) to do this on emails as they leave the organisation. You may want to include other information such as the company website address or a legal disclaimer as well.