Accounting & Tax Returns

Bookkeeping, statutory accounts and Corporation Tax for UK limited companies and partnerships.

Every active UK company has two separate reporting obligations that arrive each year: statutory accounts to Companies House, and a Corporation Tax return to HMRC. The deadlines are not aligned — accounts are due nine months after the company's year end, the CT600 is due twelve months after, and the tax itself must be paid nine months and one day after the year end.

Miss the accounts deadline and Companies House charges a fixed penalty starting at £150 and rising to £1,500. Miss the CT600 and HMRC adds its own £100 immediate penalty plus interest on unpaid tax. Both registers see the same company, and both expect a complete record at the right moment.

Our bookkeeping is built around the working software the company already uses — Xero, QuickBooks, FreeAgent, Sage — or we set one up if there is none. We reconcile bank feeds, classify transactions, handle accruals and depreciation, and prepare a full set of statutory accounts in the format Companies House requires.

Pricing is tiered by the annual volume of transactions, so a holding company with twenty entries a year is not paying the rate of a trading company with several thousand. Dormant companies — those with no significant accounting transactions during the period — file a much shorter set of accounts; we handle those as a fixed-fee annual package.

The Corporation Tax return (form CT600) is filed electronically through HMRC's online service and must be accompanied by the company's accounts and tax computations in iXBRL format. We compute the tax liability, reconcile it against the books, claim available allowances and reliefs — capital allowances, R&D where applicable, loss carry-forward — and file the return.

The CT600 itself is filed twelve months after the period end, but the tax is due three months earlier; a quirk that catches first-year companies regularly. We flag the payment deadline as soon as the year closes.

Partnerships do not pay Corporation Tax. Instead the partnership files an SA800 reporting the firm's profits, and each individual partner reports their share on a personal Self Assessment (SA100). The two filings must reconcile precisely, because HMRC cross-checks them.

We prepare both sides from the same source data, so partners receive a single coherent package — partnership return, personal returns, and a statement of each partner's share — rather than a sequence of corrections through January.