The April 2028 Companies House Reset: What the Delayed 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.

If you filed the April 2027 accounts reforms under "deal with it later" when they were paused at the start of the year, it's time to get the folder back out. In June 2026 the government confirmed the package is going ahead — not in 2027, but from 1 April 2028. The delay is real. So is the reform. And the version that has been confirmed is, for most practice owners, more work than the one you were originally bracing for.

This is not a client-newsletter item you can knock out in a paragraph. It changes what you file, what software you file it with, what your clients' competitors can see, and — if you are anywhere near a sale or succession — what a buyer finds when they look at your production stack. Here is the whole thing, and what to actually do with the 21 months you have been given.

What was paused, and what has now been confirmed

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. Plenty of people read that as a quiet burial.

It wasn't. 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. One concession came out of the review, and it is a significant one: 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 actually file

The headline is that the "balance sheet only" filing disappears. Abridged accounts go, and because a profit and loss account becomes a required component, so does the filleting that most small-company clients have quietly relied on for years.

One detail that catches people out: the trigger is the filing date, not 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 is the conversation your clients will start

Filing a profit and loss account and publishing one are now different things, and that distinction is the single most important thing to communicate 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 genuine commercial sensitivity for smaller businesses.

The trap is that 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 nobody has published. Tell clients the protection exists, that the detail is coming, and that you will confirm the steps once Companies House sets them out. Getting ahead of this and being wrong is worse than being a month behind and right.

Software-only filing: the change nobody is costing yet

Most firms hear "software-only iXBRL" and assume it doesn't apply to them, because their main accounts production package already tags and files. Usually true — for the main book. The exposure sits in the edges, and almost every practice has them:

• 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 rather than tagged iXBRL output.
• 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. Individually trivial; collectively, a project. And the deadline is the same day for all of them, which is exactly the pattern that turns a manageable change into a March 2028 scramble — the same dynamic we wrote about in the 2026 capacity crunch.

The quieter changes that will cost you time

Three further items in the package are easy to miss and 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 closes the well-worn trick of shortening a period by a single day to buy an effective three-month filing extension. If that manoeuvre is quietly part of how your firm manages a congested filing calendar, it stops being available — and the underlying capacity problem it was masking becomes visible.

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. That is a small drafting change with a real edge to it: you are signing off a more explicit assertion, so the eligibility check needs to be genuinely done and evidenced, not assumed from last year.

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.

The client conversation you should be scripting now

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 a proper conversation rather than a mass email:

• Clients who file specifically to stay invisible. Owner-managed businesses in competitive local markets often chose to filet precisely so rivals, staff and customers couldn't see turnover and margin. They need to hear about the opt-out from you, early, before they hear a garbled version 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.

There is also an advisory opening here, and it is a legitimate one rather than a manufactured upsell. Once a small company's profit and loss account is prepared for filing, the question of what those numbers actually say — and what a competitor or a lender would read into them — becomes a conversation clients will pay for. If you have been trying to move the firm up the value chain, this is a compliance change with a natural bridge into it; our guide on moving from compliance to advisory covers how to make that bridge without giving the work away.

What this means for the value of your firm

If a sale, merger or succession is anywhere on your five-year horizon, understand how this looks from the other side of the table. 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 stack means a short integration, predictable cost and no nasty surprises — it 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, operator-led buyer, we look at exactly this: not because filing software is glamorous, but because it is a reliable proxy for how tightly a firm is run. The reform doesn't change what practices are worth. How ready you are for it absolutely shows up in the number — which is the same argument set out in increasing the value of your practice, and worth reading alongside our Companies House identity verification checklist, since both reforms flow from the same Act.

Your next four moves

1. Run a filing-route audit this quarter. Export every limited company client and tag each one: main software, legacy software, WebFiling, or manual. You cannot plan until you know the size of the 90, not the 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. Segment clients by sensitivity, not by size. 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 — not by March 2028. The deadline is a filing date, and filing dates do not move for firms that ran out of time.

Frequently asked questions

When do the Companies House accounts reforms actually start?

The package takes effect from 1 April 2028. It was originally planned for 1 April 2027, paused in early 2026 after stakeholder concerns, and confirmed with the new date in June 2026. Government framed the gap as one full accounting year plus nine months — around 21 months of notice. Importantly, the trigger is the filing date, not the accounting period: any accounts filed on or after 1 April 2028 must be submitted by commercial software in iXBRL format, including late filings and older periods.

Will small companies have to make their profit and loss account public?

No — they will have to file it, but small companies and micro-entities will be able to opt out of having the profit and loss account published on the public register. Companies House, HMRC and law enforcement will still see the filed figures. The mechanics of that opt-out had not been confirmed at the time of writing, so do not promise clients a specific process yet. Confirm the position with Companies House guidance before you build it into an engagement letter or a client communication.

Are filleted and abridged accounts being abolished?

Yes. The option to prepare and file abridged accounts is being removed, and the practice of filing a balance sheet only — commonly called filleting — disappears once a profit and loss account becomes a required part of the filing. Small companies will file a balance sheet, a profit and loss account and, where applicable, an auditor's report. The privacy that filleting provided is instead handled by the opt-out from public publication rather than by leaving the figures out altogether.

Can we still use the Companies House WebFiling service after April 2028?

Not for accounts. The web and paper routes for accounts filings close, and all accounts must go through commercial software in iXBRL format. Other statutory filings remain available through the existing channels. If your practice still files any accounts through WebFiling — dormant companies and small one-off jobs are the usual culprits — those clients need to move onto software before the deadline, and you should cost the licences and the training now rather than in 2028.

Does this affect what my accountancy practice is worth?

Indirectly, yes. A buyer looking at your firm in 2027 or 2028 will check whether your accounts production is on one modern, iXBRL-capable platform or spread across spreadsheets, legacy software and WebFiling. A single clean stack is a shorter, cheaper integration and supports a stronger price. A fragmented one signals migration cost and risk, and gets discounted. The reform itself does not change multiples, but how ready you are for it is visible in diligence.