Another blog from another guy called Matt
Occasional blog posts from a random systems engineer

Draft: Fixing UK dormant company annual accounts

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History

Whilst at school and college, I loved running servers and bits and pieces.

During this time, to host anything, I needed a domain name. Since I was also having fun minimicing services I had been working with during college (whilst working part-time at my old school), I decided to create more a brand-name rather than a personal-esque domain name. After various iterations (including maplehat, mhsolutions and others), as I left college, I had settled on dockstudios.co.uk.

Since I didn’t know where my life was fully heading (I did have a job doing what I loved, but who knows!) and that my dad had run his own business for a good part of his working life, I wanted to try to protect the name - I’d already worked on several side projects under the name (and, strange as it may seem, also recorded several albums under the name). The next step I decided to take was to register as a UK limited liability company, so as of 1st July 2013, I had my own company: Dock Studios Ltd.

“Maintaining” a “company”

The upkeep of a dormant company was pretty trivial (depending on your ability to perform basic annual tasks - and, yes, several times I had several fears of the “up to £10,000” fines) - ever year you’d have to file:

  • Confirmation statement - confirm who is in charge, verify the addresses of my various roles at the company. Confirm we hadn’t traded in the year. And submit with the £25(ish) fee.
  • Accounts - For a dormant company, this meant putting a load of “0"s in boxes and then remembering whether I had one or two shares and whether they were worth £1 or £2 - and finally remember that I hadn’t yet paid the company for the shares, meaning it was owed the grand total of £2.

government changes for government reasons

However, over the past couple of years, I had received a couple of emails about “changes”. This included having to verify my identity with some government single-sign-on thing (haven’t done it - hope it’s simple!) The other is that the various methods of filing accounts (I believe including sending them in via post), but - more importantly - the ability to use my precious online tool (that had been a service provided by the government) would be going away in favour of “software-only filing”.

Apart from an email, that I haven’t yet looked back on, I can see one main source of information: https://companieshouse.blog.gov.uk/2023/02/10/changes-to-accounts-part-1-moving-to-software-only-filing/

Basically, a blog post explaining the changes with some Q&A from, what I gather are, third parties replying on behalf of the government. It becomes pretty clear that all of this “software” that can provide the “software-only” submissions are all third-party. However, I was quickly relaxed and ignored the situation for a while after reading:

Q: Will commercial software also be required for filing dormant accounts?

A: Yes, when we make the change to software-only accounts filing, this will see the removal of all other filing routes for all types of accounts. There are free options available for some companies and we will support businesses by signposting them to the software options that match their needs.

After deciding to get back round to it, I tried to find some software to use - I saw some mentions of XBRL and had assumed some open format. The government even had a tool to find software suitable based on company type, which has options for unaudited/dormant companies: (https://www.gov.uk/software-company-accounts/y/unaudited/dormant)... Could I find the column in the software table for “free”.. no…?!

After looking back at the original Q&A (https://companieshouse.blog.gov.uk/2023/02/10/changes-to-accounts-part-1-moving-to-software-only-filing/), I could see a follow up to another answer referencing a selection of free software:

We want to provide an important update regarding our previous comment. Since publishing this response, we have conducted extensive engagement with software providers and have thoroughly explored the market. Based on this insight, we now understand that free software options are not available as we had initially anticipated. However, we can confirm there are several low-cost solutions on the market that aim to make this transition as affordable as possible for small companies.

…

……

Fuck

Market research

So now, I started looking through the available software.

Given the data that’s normally provided in these accounts are pretty small - and, presumably, this is still the same data just in a slightly more automated format. Feel free to take a look at an example of a previous year’s

I’d preferably like something I can obtain once and use forever (yes, I know this seems less and less likely as years go on)… and, quite frankly, if I could get a trial and just re-install it each year, I’d be happy.

As a side note:

  • My general rule for software is that I will pay for it like a paying customer if I am the demographic of their paying customer.
  • For movies, music and games, I am the general consumer that should pay for it (and so I do!).
  • When I’m trialing enterprise software to see what it does (but just don’t like the idea of time limitation), no, I am not the target customer of a large company with hundreds of employees and customers funding me.
  • I really respect companies that understand this and give free feature-rich software to hobbyists - seeing them as people that will certainly promote the software at their workplace and will drive future revenue.

Here’s a list of the available software in a table with my gut feelings:

Next steps

Without an obvious software choice and assuming the government isn’t ring-fencing to particular third parties, I might just try writing something myself.

Working out naming and codes.

XBRL

XBRL and iXBRL is mentioned in most documentation for the format for filing (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/using-software-to-file-your-companys-information)

There appears to be documentation for this in https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/xbrl-guide-for-uk-businesses/xbrl-guide-for-uk-businesses, which also links to a third party for the underlying format (https://www.xbrl.org.uk/).

I found a seminar availabe for UK accounting standards (https://www.xbrl.org.uk/resources/seminar-2014-05-19/) - it’s been downloaded but yet to look over.

From the latest look at the filing history for my company, I can actually see an XBRL download for the latest accounts submission.

Looking at this, I can see it’s actually an XML, with HTML tags and some additional markup. Previewing the page actually looks relatively similar to the PDF page layout, but the markup contains additional infomrmation, such as:

      <xbrli:context id="dcur3">
        <xbrli:entity>
          <xbrli:identifier scheme="http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/">08590871</xbrli:identifier>
        </xbrli:entity>
        <xbrli:period>
          <xbrli:startDate>2023-08-01</xbrli:startDate>
          <xbrli:endDate>2024-08-07</xbrli:endDate>
        </xbrli:period>
      </xbrli:context>
      <xbrli:context id="icur4">
        <xbrli:entity>
          <xbrli:identifier scheme="http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/">08590871</xbrli:identifier>
        </xbrli:entity>
        <xbrli:period>
          <xbrli:instant>2024-08-07</xbrli:instant>
        </xbrli:period>
      </xbrli:context>

At this point, I’d be half-tempated to stop here and just replace the dates on each submission. Though how we’re expected to get the file to them and who “them” actually is will be the next step.

Testing

Whilst searching for the XBRL format, I found a testing tool: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/local-test-service-and-lts-update-manager

Though this seems to be mainly geared towards HMRC (presumably for tax-related submissions), I wonder if I could post a previous XBRL file through it to see what it says… ergh, of course I need JDK.

Side-note, I’m not going to install JDK on my Mac, so a simple Dockerfile away:

Submitting

Based on information, there appears to be a developer hub (which I signed up for), including information for various different submissions, however this looked quite promising.

Looking at the basic guide, they seem to have several methods of testing, which, above anything else, will be useful even for the most basic approoach (re-submitting previous years' XBRL)

Documents

According to: https://www.gov.uk/file-your-company-accounts-and-tax-return, it seems that CT600 is the Company Tax Return (for HMRC)

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