Companies House confirmed in June that the accounts changes in the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 now land in April 2028 rather than April 2027. The delay was widely read as a reprieve. It is not really. Two of the changes rewrite how small company accounts are prepared and filed, and one of them ends a filing route that hundreds of thousands of owner-managed companies currently use for free.
The headline most people picked up was the profit and loss. That is the change worth understanding properly, because the reporting of it has been muddled. But the change with the wider practical reach is the quiet one: from 1 April 2028 the Companies House web filing service and the paper route both close for accounts. Every set of accounts, from a dormant company upwards, has to arrive through commercial software.
What actually changes on 1 April 2028
The government's changes-to-company-law guidance sets out six changes to accounts filing, all commencing together:
- Software-only filing. All accounts filings made on or after 1 April 2028 must be filed by commercial software in inline eXtensible Business Reporting Language (iXBRL) format. The web and paper routes close.
- Profit and loss for small companies and micro-entities. Both must deliver a profit and loss account to Companies House. Both can opt out of having it published on the public register.
- Abridged accounts are abolished. The option small companies currently have to file an abridged balance sheet and notes disappears.
- All components filed together. You can no longer drip-feed parts of a filing; the accounts arrive as one submission.
- A stronger audit exemption statement. Directors claiming audit exemption must state which exemption they are claiming and confirm the company qualifies for it.
- Fewer accounting reference period changes. A company can shorten its accounting reference period only once every five years without giving a reason. Beyond that it needs a documented business rationale.
The guidance also notes that small companies lose the ability to file abbreviated accounts, and that the directors' report requirement may itself be removed by separate reform, so that particular element may never bite.
The profit and loss point, stated accurately
Two different things have been run together in a lot of the commentary, and the difference is the whole story.
Filing the profit and loss becomes compulsory. Publishing it does not. Companies House states that small companies and micro-entities filing a profit and loss account “can opt out of publishing this information on the public register”. Companies House, HMRC and law enforcement keep access, for fraud and tax evasion detection. Your competitor, your customer and the credit reference agencies do not get it if you opt out.
So the correct summary is not “your turnover becomes public”. It is “your turnover goes to Companies House, and whether it becomes public is a box you tick”. The mechanism for opting out has not yet been published; Companies House said the detail would be confirmed later, and it has not been at the date of this article.
That still changes something real. A micro-entity today files a balance sheet and a couple of notes. From April 2028 the accounts that go to Companies House contain the trading figures, and they are cross-checkable against the corporation tax return that HMRC already holds. If your statutory accounts and your CT600 have quietly disagreed for years, that gap stops being invisible.
The trap is the filing date, not the year end
This is where firms will get caught, and it is worth ten minutes now. The rule bites on filings made on or after 1 April 2028. It is not tied to the accounting period. A company with a year end well before the change can still be filing under the new rules, simply because it files late in its window.
Take a company with a 30 June 2027 year end. A private company normally has nine months from the end of the accounting reference period to file, so the deadline is 31 March 2028. File on 28 March and you are on the old rules. File on 2 April, having missed the deadline by two days, and you are filing accounts that must be in iXBRL, through software, with a profit and loss attached. The late filing penalty is the smaller of the two problems.
Here is the same test across a run of year ends. This is a worked illustration built from the published commencement date and the standard nine-month filing deadline, not a client file.
| Year end | Filing deadline | If you file on time | If you file late |
|---|---|---|---|
| 31 March 2027 | 31 December 2027 | Old rules | New rules from 1 Apr 2028 |
| 30 June 2027 | 31 March 2028 | Old rules by 3 days | New rules from 1 Apr 2028 |
| 31 July 2027 | 30 April 2028 | New rules | New rules |
| 31 December 2027 | 30 September 2028 | New rules | New rules |
| 31 March 2028 | 31 December 2028 | New rules | New rules |
Read the third row again. A 31 July 2027 year end — an accounting period that ends eight months before the change — cannot be filed under the old rules at all, because its deadline falls after 1 April 2028. If your year end is anywhere from July 2027 onwards, the first set of accounts you prepare under the new regime is the one you are already trading through.
What software-only filing costs a company that files its own accounts
If you use an accountant, this is close to a non-event: practice accounts production software already produces iXBRL and files by API, so the change lands on your accountant's desk, not yours. The companies that feel it are the ones filing their own accounts through the free Companies House web service, and there are a lot of them.
Those companies have three routes. Buy accounts production software. Move to a bookkeeping package that files statutory accounts — the filing capability is not universal, so check the specific plan rather than the brand. Or hand the filing to an accountant. Companies House publishes a list of software providers and its own guidance on filing by software, and the sensible move is to pick from that list rather than assume the tool you already pay for will cover it.
The dormant company case is the one people forget. A dormant company still files accounts, and from April 2028 it still needs software to do it. If you hold three dormant companies to protect trading names, that is three filings a year that used to be free and now are not.
Identity verification is the other half of the same programme
The accounts change does not sit on its own. Companies House identity verification opened as a mandatory requirement on 18 November 2025, starting a 12-month transition for existing directors and people with significant control, tied to each company's confirmation statement date. New directors and PSCs verify at the point of appointment. Verification is done directly with Companies House through GOV.UK One Login, or through an Authorised Corporate Service Provider — an AML-supervised firm such as an accountant, solicitor or formation agent.
Failing to verify is an offence, and the practical consequence is blunt: you cannot make filings for your company or start a new one. Identity verification for the people who file at Companies House — as opposed to the directors and PSCs — comes later, no earlier than November 2027, with at least six months' notice. Put next to a software-only accounts regime from April 2028, the direction is obvious. Every filing will be made through identified software by an identified person.
Do this in the next month
Four jobs, none of them long:
- Work out which year end is your first one under the new rules. Take your year end, add nine months, and see whether the answer is on or after 1 April 2028. If it is, that is the set of accounts to plan for — and it may be the year you are trading through right now.
- Decide who is filing. If you file your own accounts on the Companies House website, choose your replacement route this year rather than in the month it closes. Include any dormant companies you hold.
- Reconcile your statutory accounts to your CT600. If the profit in your filed accounts has never matched the profit in your tax return, find out why before the profit and loss starts going to Companies House alongside it.
- Check every director and PSC is identity-verified. The transition tied to confirmation statements ran from 18 November 2025. If someone has slipped through, an unverified director blocks the company's filings, not just their own.
What is still open
Three things genuinely are not settled, and it is worth being straight about which. The opt-out mechanism for publishing the profit and loss has not been specified — Companies House said it would confirm the process, and at the date of this article it has not. The directors' report element may be removed by separate reform before it commences. And the fee position for filing software is a commercial market rather than a published figure, so the cost of replacing a free web filing depends entirely on which route you pick.
What is settled is the date and the mechanism. Accounts filed on or after 1 April 2028 go through commercial software in iXBRL, and small and micro accounts carry a profit and loss when they go.
If you want this handled rather than diarised, that is what our company secretarial service and accountancy packages are for, and it is the same conversation as Making Tax Digital — both are the same shift from typing numbers into a government website to filing them from software. If you run a limited company and currently file your own accounts, that is the change to plan for.