Your first year: a compliance calendar

The first year is the one businesses most often get wrong, for a structural reason: the deadlines derive from dates that are not your incorporation date, and the first accounting period is usually longer than twelve months.

Start with your accounting reference date. That sets your year end, which sets your accounts filing deadline. Because the first period runs from incorporation to that date, it is frequently thirteen or fourteen months — so the deadline lands later than people expect, and they stop watching for it.

Then there is the confirmation statement, which sits on its own cycle and confirms that the registry's information about your company is still correct. It is a confirmation, not an update: if a director changed, that should already have been filed separately.

Corporation tax adds two more dates, and this is where the sequencing catches people. The payment deadline generally falls before the filing deadline. Businesses reason that the return is not due yet, so nothing is owed. That is not how it works.

Write all of it down on the day you incorporate, with a review point three weeks before each date rather than on it. The review point is the part that matters — if the first time you look is the week it is due, there is no room for a document to be missing.