If one supplier can stop your production, their financial health is your operational risk. It is also assessable, at no cost, from information already filed.
Three things to look at first
Whether they are filing at all. A company that has stopped filing has usually stopped doing other things too. Late or missing accounts are the earliest public signal available.
The trend, not the level. One year tells you little. Three years tells you whether revenue is growing, margin is compressing, and debt is rising. A supplier whose margin has halved while revenue grew is buying business, and that is rarely sustainable.
Short-term obligations against short-term assets. If current liabilities exceed current assets and the gap is widening, the company is being financed by its suppliers — possibly including you, if you pay in advance.
What the accounts will not tell you
Filed statements are historical and often thin. They will not show a lost key customer, a dispute, or an owner who has decided to retire.
Some of that is observable anyway. Is their lead time drifting? Are they asking for faster payment than last year? Has their experienced contact left? Commercial behaviour changes before accounts do.
Decide the response before you need it
Assessment is only useful if it changes something. For each supplier you genuinely depend on, decide in advance: qualify a second source, hold more stock, negotiate a notice period, or accept the risk consciously.
A second qualified supplier is expensive and usually worth it for the one or two inputs that would actually stop you. For everything else, knowing is enough.
The failure mode to avoid is discovering a supplier’s difficulty from their administrator’s letter, having had three years of filed warnings available the whole time.