Over the last 6 months the Inform Direct team have been working hard on great new features for our acclaimed company secretarial software. Here’s some of our favourite additions to make life easier for businesses and accountants:
Dormant company accounts
There’s over 300,000 dormant companies in the UK. While they’re spared a lot of accounting headaches, they still need to file dormant company accounts each year. Rather than submitting them on paper, the good news is they can be completed electronically, something that you can now easily do in Inform Direct.
We’ve created a quick and simple wizard to guide you through the process, helping you to create perfect dormant company accounts first time. Our secure link means you can submit the accounts to Companies House and receive a quick response from them, often within an hour.
We’ll also send you automatic reminders as your accounts fall due so you needn’t worry about remembering next year’s deadline. If you manage multiple companies in Inform Direct, your dashboard gives a simple overview of which of your companies have accounts or confirmation statements (which replace the annual return from 30 June 2016) due.
You can read more about how we’re making it easier to file dormant company accounts.
Dividend voucher creation
Every time a company pays a dividend, it must record the details and produce dividend vouchers for shareholders. If you’re doing it manually, even from a template, it can take ages – particularly if your company has a lot of shareholders! Wouldn’t it be great to create a whole set of vouchers at the press of a button?
Our straightforward process uses the information on shareholders already available from Companies House, so you have less to do. Inform Direct does all the necessary tax calculations and offers full support if a shareholder decides to waive their dividends, either once or on an ongoing basis.
As with other company documents produced in Inform Direct, you can brand dividend vouchers using a company logo. There’s also a full history of dividends paid, so you can easily handle any queries from shareholders about the dividends they’ve received.
Read more about how you can create dividend vouchers the easy way.
An all-inclusive subscription option
We’re committed to keeping the core features of Inform Direct free to use for everyone. Obviously we’re glad that lots of people are finding our paid features useful, and we want to make using them as easy- and as economical- as possible.
So we’ve introduced a subscription option, which includes all our features for a single monthly payment based on the number of companies you manage. As well as making it easier to budget, for regular users the subscription service offers you even better value, particularly as you add more companies to your portfolio.
A subscription user would then only need to settle Companies House fees as they fall due. So, whereas the fee for submitting an Annual Return (the predecessor to the confirmation statement) has to date been £25 each time, once you are on a subscription you would only pay the £13 Companies House fee. If you choose to use your own Companies House presenter account rather than ours, you’ll pay absolutely nothing.
If you prefer just to pay per transaction, that’s fine too. Our Pay As You Go option isn’t going anywhere!
Allowing multiple users to access your account
One of the features that subscription users have automatic access to is the ability to create multiple users, so you won’t have to share login details with other staff. So, if you’re an accountant, you can invite other staff to use Inform Direct. Or if you’re the director of a company, you might want your fellow directors to be able to log in and make changes themselves.
You can invite additional users to access your portfolio of companies and they’ll then log in with their own email address and password. There’s no restrictions on how many users you can create, and no extra charge for each user you add.
We’d love to hear what you think about our new features, so please do leave us your feedback.
We’re continuing to develop lots of further enhancements to make things even easier, so watch this space for further updates.
All companies are required to maintain up to date company records. Inform Direct is the perfect tool to help you easily keep everything up to date.