Business guide
Compliance for small companies
4 chapters · 9 min read
Most compliance failures are not decisions. They are things nobody was watching: a deadline that moved, an obligation triggered by a change, or a filing everyone assumed someone else had made.
This guide sets out what a small company actually has to do on a recurring basis, and how to build a system that does not depend on anyone remembering.
Contents
Chapter 01
The annual cycle
Two filings dominate the year: a confirmation that the registry's information about your company is still accurate, and your annual accounts. They have separate deadlines derived from separate dates, which is the root of most confusion.
Corporation tax adds a third and fourth date — the payment deadline and the filing deadline — and the payment usually falls first. People assume nothing is due until the return is due. It is.
Chapter 02
Event-driven filings
Some obligations are triggered by things happening rather than by the calendar. These are the ones most often missed, because there is no annual reminder attached.
- Appointing or removing a director
- A change to a director's name or service address
- Issuing or transferring shares
- Changing the registered address
- A change in who has significant control
- Changing the company name or its accounting reference date
Chapter 03
Building a system that works
A date in one person's calendar is not a system; it is a single point of failure. A working system has the full list written down somewhere shared, with a review point well before each deadline and a named person accountable.
The review point matters more than the deadline. If the first time you look at a filing is the week it is due, you have no room for the information to be missing.
Chapter 04
What happens when you are late
Penalties escalate with time and generally cannot be appealed on the basis that you forgot. Beyond the money, persistent lateness invites closer scrutiny of everything else you file, and in the worst case a company can be struck from the register.
If you are already behind, the order of operations matters: establish the true position first, then deal with the oldest outstanding item. Filing this year's return while last year's is missing rarely helps.
Compliance work is not difficult, but it is unforgiving about dates. If you would rather it sat with someone whose job it is, that is what our compliance service does.
Keep reading
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