Five small steps to healthy company records

Lots of limited companies are now using our Inform Direct company secretarial software to manage their company records, statutory books and Companies House filing. We’re pleased that so many people have found it intuitive and easy to use, the design of the system driven by what you want to achieve rather than by the layout of forms.

What we didn’t expect to hear are the number of stories about existing company details at Companies House that aren’t as users expect when they first review their records. As several of these tales have now been repeated a number of times, we hope it’s useful to present some of the lessons customers have learnt here. If, after reading this, you want to give your Companies House records a free healthcheck, you can register for Inform Direct, the company secretarial software that’s free to use.

If you’d like to share other lessons, contact us and we’ll publish a selection of them.

It may sound obvious, but it’s all too easy to leave a Companies House change for another day. Maybe you don’t have the right form to hand. You’re sure you’ll remember tomorrow, but then other work comes along and before you know it several months have gone by. As Companies House reserve the right to impose fines for late submissions, a simple omission can be a costly one. Frequent late filings could result in even more severe action against the company.

Most changes in shareholders don’t need to be reported to Companies House until the company’s next confirmation statement (which replaced the annual return from 30 June 2016). However, as the company must maintain an up to date register of members it’s still important to record changes promptly. Particularly in a company where shareholders change frequently – because the shares are frequently traded or shareholders update their details – it saves a lot of time to use a system like Inform Direct that updates your register of members and register of share transfers while simultaneously saving the data in preparation for the next confirmation statement. Without an efficient system, when preparing the Companies House confirmation statement you can be left trying to excavate and re-input the details of a great number of shareholder changes that happened a year ago.

A number of our users have been surprised at the addresses stored on the public record as their director service address. Some service addresses of directors have been out of date because no Companies House form CH01 has yet been filed. In other cases, a director’s residential address has been used as their service address, meaning that their home address is available to anyone searching the public record. This can mean a lot of extra unwanted post at home and potentially increase the risk of fraud. If you’d prefer your home address to be less public, consider changing your service address to be the same as the company’s registered office address.

It’s easy to get confused by complicated forms and enter things incorrectly, which is why we’ve based Inform Direct on what our users want to achieve, letting the system do the hard work of filling in the forms. It’s worth taking special care when someone other than a director of the company does filings for you – so if you pass details to your accountant to complete the forms, it’s worth checking the details before they’re sent to Companies House.

A single person may be a director, secretary and shareholder of a company. Even someone who is just a shareholder might have shareholdings in different share classes or hold some shares themselves and some jointly with others. Add in a full set of statutory registers and you have a whole mass of records relating to the same person. However, in Companies House’s records and in many software packages these roles and holdings by the same person are all but completely separate.

This means that if you make a change in one place, the same change is not automatically made to other records. So you could change your name but then still find your old name appearing in your Companies House records or find that even after submitting one form to Companies House an address you vacated years ago is still appearing elsewhere on the public record. Unless you remember to update them, your statutory books can also become out of date.

In Inform Direct, you can easily group together all the roles and shareholdings a single person has in a company. By doing so, it means you only ever need to make one change and Inform Direct will do the rest, automatically notifying Companies House where required and updating the full suite of your company registers. It will also recognise when you change an address for one person that other people use that address, and give you the choice to update those too.

Remember that if someone acts as an officer for more than one company, you’ll also need to advise Companies House of any changes separately for each company.

To help protect your company from the growing problem of corporate fraud, it’s a good idea to check the details Companies House hold on a regular basis. In doing so, you can check that no fraudulent filings have taken place. Better still, have the work done for you: Inform Direct does a regular comparison of your data with that held at Companies House and, if it identifies any important differences, emails you.

As a further protective measure, it’s best only to share your company’s authentication code – used to identify someone filing as having authority to do so – with those people who need to file changes with Companies House.

Don’t delay, check today!

The earlier that you check and identify any issues, the easier they will be to resolve. If you leave it too late, as well as potentially being more likely to suffer fines you can find yourself needing to re-send old annual returns or confirmation statements to correct the position. Don’t put it off: take a look at your company details today!