Year-end accounts are the one piece of paperwork every limited company has to produce, whatever else has or hasn't happened during the year. They're also the piece most directors understand least, because they're written to satisfy a reporting framework, not to be an easy read. My job is to close that gap: prepare the accounts properly, file them on time, and then actually explain what they say.
That means preparing statutory accounts to the correct reporting framework for a company your size, whether that's FRS 105 for a micro-entity or FRS 102 for a small company, filing them at Companies House within the deadline, and then going through them with you line by line so you understand what they show, not just where to sign.
The deadlines that actually matter
For an existing private limited company, statutory accounts are due at Companies House nine months after your accounting reference date. First-year accounts after incorporation get slightly longer, twenty-one months from the date of incorporation. Miss the deadline and Companies House applies an automatic penalty that scales with how late you are, starting at £150 for filing up to a month late and rising to £1,500 for filing more than six months late, and that penalty doubles if you were late the previous year too. It applies regardless of whether the company traded, made a profit, or made anything at all.
Note that this is separate from your Corporation Tax return to HMRC, which runs on its own twelve-month deadline from your accounting period end, and separate again from your confirmation statement to Companies House. Three different filings, three different clocks. Keeping track of all three is part of what you're paying for.
What done properly looks like
Properly prepared accounts reconcile cleanly back to the bookkeeping behind them, use the correct framework for your company's size, and get filed with enough margin that a query or correction doesn't turn into a missed deadline. And they get explained to you afterward. A set of accounts that just gets filed and forgotten hasn't really done its job, because the whole point of the exercise is that you should come away understanding your own business better, not just discharging a legal obligation.
What goes wrong when this isn't handled properly is usually a deadline missed by a matter of days, an automatic penalty for something that was entirely avoidable, or accounts that get signed off without the director really knowing what they say. None of that is dramatic on its own. All of it is avoidable with a bit of discipline applied consistently, which is the whole idea behind Discipline as one of the five parts of my CAPID framework.
Where it fits in the Clarity Package
Year-end accounts filing is included in the Clarity Package for every client, built on the bookkeeping and, where relevant, the VAT work done throughout the year. Because the records are already current, preparing the accounts isn't a separate reconstruction project each year. It's a natural close to work that's already been done properly all along.
As with everything else in the Clarity Package, it's one fixed fee, agreed in writing before we start. As an Authorised Corporate Service Provider with Companies House, I'm able to handle identity verification and filing requirements directly as part of this service.
More on how I approach this kind of work at my method.
If you'd like your year-end handled properly this time, book a free discovery call or email me and we'll get started.