Year end accounts

Do your year-end accounts the right way

Year-end accounts, or annual accounts, are an important legal requirement for any company operating in the UK. They summarise a company’s financial activity throughout the financial year and provide valuable insights into its financial health.

To provide beneficial information, you need to gather a vast number of documents and bank statements, carefully comb through the figures, and accurately report the data. As you probably already know, that’s a mammoth task that requires great care and a significant investment of time.

But what if we said you could unburden yourself from the toughest and most time-consuming aspects of year-end accounts? Our team of experienced accounts will work with you to ensure your annual accounts are accurate, compliant and submitted on time.

Who has to file year-end accounts?

Legally, limited companies must file year-end accounts online at the same time as their company tax return — within 12 months of the end of your company’s financial year. They form the basis of your tax calculations so HMRC can ensure you’ve calculated the correct amount.

You must also keep comprehensive financial records and submit annual accounts to Companies House. The latter must be filed within nine months following the conclusion of your company’s fiscal year.

Sole traders are not legally required to file statutory accounts with HMRC or Companies House, but they must keep records of their business income and expenses for their tax returns.

What do I need to include in my statutory year-end accounts?

Here’s a year-end checklist:

• Director’s report. This is a document your company directors must write. It summarises your business’s performance over the year with your directors’ views of its current performance over the year and how they think it will perform in the future.
• Balance sheet. This gives details of a business’s assets and liabilities at the end of the accounting period.
• Profit and loss. This document provides a summary of income and expenses and gives the total amount of profit or loss over the accounting period.
• Explanatory notes. These provide commentary and explanations on the details of the profit and loss account and balance sheet.

You need to provide HMRC and your shareholders with year-end accounts. However, if your business fulfils two of the following, you only need to submit abbreviated year-end accounts to Companies House:

• has under 50 employees
• turnover is less than £10.2m
• you have less than £5.1m on your balance sheet.

What are abbreviated year-end accounts? They’re similar to full year-end accounts, but they consist of nothing more than a balance sheet signed by one named director.

Our year-end accounting services

We’ve given you a lot of information so far; now it’s up to you to decide what you do with it. You might think it makes sense to cut down on fees by doing as much as possible yourself, or you might realise how much there is ahead of you and get the help of an accountant.

With our accounting and year-end service, you’ll be able to get back to the parts of your business that really matter to you. You won’t be rushing into your accounting either, which could otherwise open you up to the risk of costly mistakes and penalties.

You’ll find us well-versed in the latest accounting practices and attentive to your personal needs. We’ll work as closely as possible with you to provide accurate, timely and reliable accounting services that you can use to propel your business forward.

We also use cloud accounting software, giving you greater control over your accounting and finances than ever before. It also allows us to be more timely, accurate and transparent than your last accountant.

Need to know more before you enlist our help with your year-end accounts? Get in touch with us today.