How do accounting practices manage Companies House filings for multiple clients at once?

How do accounting practices manage Companies House filings for multiple clients at once? Well, let’s first start out with the fact that there are over 5.4 million companies registered at Companies House. For accountants who act for limited company clients, each one of those registrations represents a set of statutory obligations that must be met on time, every year, regardless of what else is happening in the practice.

A practice with 80 limited company clients does not have 80 annual deadlines. It has several hundred. Confirmation statements, annual accounts, officer changes, share allotments, PSC register updates. These are separate filings, with separate deadlines, filed through separate routes. Managing them manually, even with spreadsheets, becomes unmanageable at scale.

What companies are actually required to file

Understanding the full scope of the obligation is the starting point. It is not just annual accounts.

Confirmation statement: every active and dormant limited company must file a confirmation statement at least once every 12 months, within 14 days of the review period end date. The filing fee is £50 online or £110 on paper. Missing this deadline does not trigger an automatic financial penalty, but it leads directly to the strike-off process.

Annual accounts: private limited companies must file within nine months of the financial year-end. Public limited companies have six months. Late filing penalties start at £150 for private companies and double for second consecutive late filings.

Event-driven filings: officer appointments, resignations, and changes to personal details must be filed within 14 days. Share allotments and transfers have their own timelines. Changes to the People with Significant Control register must be filed promptly when they occur.

Each of these filings can fall on a different date for each client. And each client may have multiple events in any given year. The calendar is not predictable, and it does not slow down during busy season.

How practices currently try to manage this

Most practices start with spreadsheets. There is a master list of clients, their Companies House numbers, their year-ends, their confirmation statement due dates. Someone updates it manually. Someone checks it weekly — or is supposed to.

This breaks in a number of predictable ways. The spreadsheet gets out of date when someone forgets to update it. A confirmation statement date is missed because the review period end differs from the date the previous statement was filed. An officer change happens mid-year and no one adds it to the tracker. A deadline falls during a team member’s absence and there is no automated alert to catch it.

At ten clients this is manageable with discipline. At fifty it is fragile. At a hundred it is a risk management problem.

What software-led portfolio management looks like

Inform Direct by Bright is built specifically for practices managing company secretarial work across a portfolio. Rather than a spreadsheet that someone has to remember to check, it gives a single dashboard view of every client’s Companies House obligations, with deadlines calculated automatically from the data held at Companies House.

• Confirmation statement deadlines are tracked automatically for every company in the portfolio, with alerts before the 14-day window opens

• Annual accounts deadlines are calculated from each company’s year-end date and company type — private limited, public limited, dormant

• Officer appointments, resignations, and share allotments are managed within the platform and filed directly to Companies House with no paper forms

• PSC register changes are tracked and filed in the platform, with a full audit trail per company

• The portfolio view shows every upcoming deadline across all clients in a single screen, sortable by urgency

This removes the manual tracking layer entirely. The system calculates what is due, when it is due, and surfaces it before the deadline passes. Filing is done directly from the platform, so there is no need to log into the Companies House portal separately for each client.

For practices also thinking about how to compete with larger firms on technology, see: How do small and mid-size accounting practices compete with Big Four technology?.

The cost of getting it wrong

The financial penalties for late accounts filings are fixed by statute and double on second consecutive late filings. But the reputational cost is arguably higher. A client who receives a late filing penalty because their accountant missed a deadline is a client who starts looking for alternatives.

For practices that act as registered office or provide company secretarial services as part of a bundle, missing a Companies House deadline is not just a compliance failure — it is a service failure that undermines the entire client relationship.

How Inform Direct compares to the alternatives

Managing company secretarial work for multiple limited company clients?

This content may have been developed with the assistance of AI tools. Content is reviewed by a member of the Bright team before publication. Guidance on legislation can be obtained from your industry body.