What the delayed Companies House accounts reforms mean for your practice

General information for practice owners, current at the time of writing (July 2026). Rules, dates and implementation detail change — check the current Companies House position and take your own advice before acting.

The accounts reforms planned for April 2027 were paused at the start of the year. In June 2026 the government confirmed the package is going ahead from 1 April 2028. For many practices, the confirmed version involves more work than the original plan.

The reforms change what you file, what software you file it with, what your clients' competitors can see, and, if you are near a sale or succession, what a buyer finds when they look at your accounts production systems. Practices have 21 months to prepare.

The pause and the confirmed date

The accounts reforms come out of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 — the same legislation behind the identity verification regime practices have spent the last year working through. The accounts half was originally set for 1 April 2027. Early in 2026, after sustained pushback from business and professional bodies, ministers paused the package and put it under review.

In June 2026 the government confirmed the reforms with a new commencement date of 1 April 2028, framing the interval as one full accounting year plus nine months — roughly 21 months of notice — and saying it will contact companies via their registered email address. The review produced one significant concession: small companies and micro-entities will be able to opt out of having their profit and loss account published on the public register, even though they will have to file it.

What small and micro companies will file

The "balance sheet only" filing ends. Abridged accounts go, and because a profit and loss account becomes a required component, so does filleting, which many small-company clients have used for years.

The rule applies by filing date, whatever the accounting period. Anything submitted on or after 1 April 2028 has to go through software in iXBRL — including late filings and catch-up work on old periods. A dormant company three years behind is not exempt because its year ends predate the reform.

The opt-out from publishing the profit and loss account

Filing a profit and loss account and publishing one are now different things, and clients need that difference explained carefully. Small companies and micro-entities will be able to opt out of publication; Companies House, HMRC and law enforcement retain access regardless. The stated rationale is to balance transparency against commercial sensitivity for smaller businesses.

The mechanics of the opt-out had not been confirmed at the time of writing. We don't yet know whether it is a per-filing election, a standing preference, whether it sits with the company or the agent, or what evidence — if any — is required. Do not put a process into an engagement letter or a client email that assumes a mechanism that has not been published. Tell clients the protection exists, that the detail is coming, and that you will confirm the steps once Companies House sets them out.

Costing the move to software-only filing

If your main accounts production package already tags and files in iXBRL, most of your client list is covered. The exposure sits with clients handled outside it, such as:

• Dormant and shell companies filed through WebFiling because it takes two minutes and costs nothing.
• Legacy clients on old software versions that produce a PDF without iXBRL tagging.
• One-off and lapsed clients handled outside the main workflow — the "favour" jobs that never made it onto the system.
• Acquired blocks of fees still running on the seller's old platform because migration kept slipping down the list.
• Group and unusual entities where someone has historically hand-built the filing.

Each of those becomes a licence, a migration and a re-training job. Each is small, and together they make a project. The deadline is the same day for all of them, so leaving them late creates a rush in March 2028, the same pattern we wrote about in the 2026 capacity crunch.

Other changes that will take time

Three further items in the package will each generate work:

Accounting reference periods. A company will only be able to shorten its accounting reference period once in any five-year period unless an exemption applies, and a further shortening will need a documented business reason. This ends the practice of shortening a period by a single day to gain an effective three-month filing extension. If your firm uses that to manage a congested filing calendar, it stops being available, and the capacity problem behind it will need solving another way.

Audit exemption statements. Any company claiming exemption from statutory audit must give a strengthened statement on the balance sheet identifying the specific exemption relied on and confirming eligibility. The drafting change is small, and it means you are signing off a more explicit assertion. Carry out the eligibility check each year and keep the evidence.

Complete filings. All components of the accounts and reports must be filed together, which removes the drip-feed approach some firms use to stop the clock while a straggler is chased.

Preparing the client conversation

Set against a register of over 5.4 million companies at the end of March 2026 — around 4.9 million on the effective register, excluding those in dissolution or liquidation — this is a change that touches essentially every limited company client on your books. Two groups need an individual conversation:

• Clients who filet to keep their figures private. Owner-managed businesses in competitive local markets often chose to filet so that rivals, staff and customers couldn't see turnover and margin. They need to hear about the opt-out from you, early, before they read about it elsewhere.
• Clients whose size classification recently changed. The threshold uplift from April 2025 — micro turnover to £1m, small to £15m, medium to £54m, with balance-sheet limits up by roughly half and employee counts of 10, 50 and 250 — moved an estimated 133,000 entities into a smaller band. Some of those clients are newly "small" and have never thought about small-company filing at all.

The change also creates advisory work. Once a small company's profit and loss account is prepared for filing, clients will want to know what those numbers say and what a competitor or a lender would read into them, and that is a conversation they will pay for. If you have been trying to move the firm up the value chain, this compliance change leads naturally into it. Our guide on moving from compliance to advisory covers how to charge for that step.

How the reforms affect the value of your firm

If a sale, merger or succession is anywhere on your five-year horizon, consider how this looks to a buyer. A buyer running diligence in 2027 or 2028 will ask a simple question: is accounts production on one modern, iXBRL-capable platform, or is it spread across three systems, a spreadsheet and a WebFiling login?

A single clean system means a short integration and predictable cost, which supports the price. A fragmented one means the buyer is inheriting a migration project with a statutory deadline attached, and they will price that in. As a direct buyer, we look at this closely, because filing software is a good indicator of how tightly a firm is run. The reform does not change what practices are worth, but how ready you are for it affects the price a buyer offers. Our guide to increasing the value of your practice covers the same ground, and our Companies House identity verification checklist covers the other reform from the same Act.

Four steps to take now

1. Run a filing-route audit this quarter. Export every limited company client and tag each one: main software, legacy software, WebFiling, or manual. That gives you the number of clients that need work; in the worked example, it was 90 of 400.
2. Get a written answer from your software vendor. Ask specifically: does our current licence tier produce compliant iXBRL for small and micro filings including a profit and loss account, and what does it cost to add the clients we file elsewhere? Get it in writing and diarise a re-check for 2027.
3. Sort clients by how sensitive their figures are. Flag the clients for whom published profit figures would be commercially damaging. That list is your priority communication group the moment the opt-out mechanics are published.
4. Book the work in. Put remediation on the quarterly partner agenda with a named owner and a target of clearing it by mid-2027. The deadline applies to every accounts filing made on or after 1 April 2028.