Behind on your accounts? Here's what actually happens next.

If you're reading this because you've fallen behind, first thing: you are not the first person to do this, and you will not be the last. Life gets in the way. A bereavement, a health scare, a business that took off faster than expected, or simply months where opening the post felt harder than not opening it. I see this every month. My first job, most of the time, is not to do the numbers. It's to calm you down and show you exactly where you stand.

So let's do that. Here is what actually happens when company accounts, VAT or a Self Assessment return run late, in plain terms, with the real figures.

If your company accounts are late at Companies House

Companies House charges an automatic penalty the moment your accounts miss the filing deadline. For a private limited company, it works on a sliding scale based on how late you are:

• Up to 1 month late: £150
• 1 to 3 months late: £375
• 3 to 6 months late: £750
• More than 6 months late: £1,500

Public companies pay roughly double those amounts at every stage. And if you were late the previous year too, the penalty for a private company doubles again. There's no getting around it by filing "almost" on time. It's a fixed, automatic charge, not a judgment on you.

What Companies House does not do, in most cases, is march straight to striking your company off the register the day you're late. That's a real risk if accounts go unfiled for a long time and nobody responds to their letters, but it's a late stage consequence, not an immediate one. You have room to act.

If your Self Assessment tax return is late

HMRC's penalties follow a similar logic. They escalate the longer you leave it, rather than hit you all at once:

• Miss the deadline: an immediate £100 penalty, even if you have no tax to pay or have already paid what you owe.
• 3 months late: daily penalties of £10 a day, up to a maximum of £900 on top of the £100.
• 6 months late: a further penalty of 5% of the tax due, or £300, whichever is higher.
• 12 months late: another 5% of the tax due, or £300, whichever is higher, again.

Those are the filing penalties. Late payment carries its own separate interest and penalties on top, which is exactly why the two get confused and the anxiety compounds. It can look, from the outside, like a number that only ever grows. That's true if you do nothing. It stops being true the moment you engage.

Why avoiding it makes it worse, and guessing makes it worse still

Here's the pattern I see most often. Someone falls a few weeks behind, then a few months, then it's simply easier not to think about it. The deadline passes, the penalty lands, and the shame of that first letter makes the second one harder to open, not easier. I understand that completely. It's a very human response to a very unhuman system.

The other pattern, which worries me more, is panic in the opposite direction: filing a return with figures estimated or guessed under pressure, just to make the deadline pain stop. That can create a worse problem than the lateness itself. Wrong figures on a return can trigger their own penalties for inaccuracy, and correcting a filed return is more work than filing it properly the first time would have been.

Catching up properly, even late, beats both of those routes almost every time. The penalties above are known, fixed, and often negotiable if there's a genuine reasonable excuse. A wrong return, or another year of silence, isn't fixed. It just keeps costing you, in fees, in interest, and in the low hum of worry that sits behind everything else you're trying to do.

What actually happens when you call me

A discovery call with me is free, and there's no pressure on it. If you're already well served elsewhere, I'll tell you so, plainly. If you're behind, I'll ask what's outstanding, get a realistic view of where things stand, and tell you honestly what it will take to sort it. No lecture, no drama.

This is where the practice's approach, I call it CAPID, actually earns its keep: courage to look at the real numbers, accountability for getting them filed, perspective on what genuinely matters versus what's just noise, integrity in doing it properly rather than guessing, and discipline to keep it from happening again. You can read more about how that works on my method page. But the short version is this: I am not here to make you feel worse about being behind. I am here to get you caught up and keep you there.

If you're behind on your accounts, your VAT, or your Self Assessment, the single best thing you can do today is talk to someone about it rather than avoid it for one more week. Book a free discovery call and we'll work out exactly where you stand, or email me directly at daneon@dfaccounting.co.uk. I do not need chasing. That is the whole point of hiring me.