There's a moment that almost every applicant to an innovation programme, grant round, or procurement opportunity has experienced. You've found an opportunity that looks relevant. You open the application form. And there it is: a long section asking for your organisation's registration number, trading address, key personnel, accreditations, company description, VAT number, and contact details, the same information you filled in somewhere else three months ago.
It's a small friction, but it accumulates. And on the other side of the process, programme managers receive hundreds of submissions with the same basic organisational information entered slightly differently each time (inconsistent formats, missing fields, unverified data) which creates its own headaches at the due diligence stage.
Business Profiles in SimplyDo are designed to solve both sides of this problem.
What a Business Profile Is
A Business Profile is a reusable, verifiable record of an organisation (its identity, structure, credentials, and key people) that lives in SimplyDo independently of any individual application.
The term "business" is used loosely here by design. A profile can represent a limited company, a sole trader, a charity, a university, a public sector body or department, or any other kind of entity, UK-based or international. Whatever the structure, the profile captures the same core information: name, logo, description, contact details (email, phone, website, social channels), registered and trading addresses, registration and VAT numbers, key personnel, and accreditations and certifications received: Cyber Essentials, ISO 27001, SOC 2, and so on.
Once created, that profile can be attached to any application the user submits, across any opportunity running on SimplyDo, and across different SimplyDo customer organisations. Fill it in once, and it travels with you.
Creating a Profile (Most of It Happens Automatically)
The prospect of setting up a detailed organisational profile from scratch is enough to put some people off. SimplyDo makes this significantly easier by automating the majority of it.
When creating a new profile, applicants simply search for their organisation by name or company number. SimplyDo draws on a global database to surface a match and automatically populates as many fields as it can from public data and its integration partnerships. For UK companies, the Companies House integration goes further by automatically verifying the business and pulling in director information, shareholding structure, and registered details, saving applicants from having to locate and enter this manually.
Once a website is provided, SimplyDo's AI can fetch and generate the organisation's overview description, logo, identify relevant accreditations, and fill in other details that would otherwise require manual effort. The result is that most of a profile can be complete within a few minutes, with the applicant primarily reviewing and confirming rather than typing from scratch.
Collaboration and Permissions
Organisations rarely submit applications through a single person. In practice, a bid might be coordinated by one person, reviewed by another, and submitted by a third, with colleagues across departments needing visibility of what's been submitted and when.
Business Profiles are built for this reality. Profile owners can invite colleagues to join the profile, giving them the ability to reuse it in their own applications and contribute to shared submissions. A flexible permissions system allows other users to access previous and current applications where needed and without requiring everyone to share login credentials or work through a single bottleneck.
For new users joining an organisation that already has a profile on SimplyDo, onboarding is simplified further. SimplyDo automatically matches verified users to existing business profiles based on their email domain, so a new colleague joining the platform can be associated with the right organisational profile immediately, without anyone having to manually add them.
Due Diligence Built In
For programme managers, Business Profiles shift due diligence from a separate, manual process into something that happens as a natural by-product of how applicants engage with the platform.
Because profiles are verified against Companies House where applicable, and because they include credit and financial information (including a credit score) alongside director and shareholding data, programme managers have access to a meaningful picture of each applicant organisation from the moment a submission lands. This is particularly valuable for sensitive supply chain programmes, public grant funding opportunities, or any process where the credibility and financial standing of applicants genuinely matters.
Rather than chasing applicants for company documents, running separate searches, or waiting until shortlisting to discover that an applicant doesn't meet basic eligibility criteria, the verification and enrichment happens consistently up front as part of a process they've already completed for other purposes.
Why Reusability Matters
The deeper value of Business Profiles isn't any individual feature. It's the compound effect of an organisational identity that gets more complete and more useful over time, rather than being recreated from scratch for every application.
For applicants, it lowers the barrier to engagement with new programmes. For programme managers, it means cleaner, more consistent data and fewer gaps to chase. For organisations running multiple programmes, whether that's a combined authority managing several innovation funds, a healthcare body running successive supplier frameworks, or a government department with ongoing open calls, it means that the organisational intelligence built up through one programme carries through to the next.
SimplyDo's Business Profiles are available across all programmes on the platform. If you'd like to see how they work in the context of your own programme design, we'd be happy to walk you through it.
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