Accounts and CT600
Prepared from reconciled records, filed at Companies House and HMRC, and gone through with you rather than emailed at you.
Limited companies
The company's money is not your money
That one sentence is behind almost every expensive problem in an owner-managed company — and behind the real advantage of having one. We keep the paperwork level with the decisions.
What you get
- Accounts and CT600 filed on time
- A salary and dividend plan, before the year end
- Board minutes and dividend vouchers done properly
- Your director's loan watched all year
- Confirmation statement handled
- One fixed monthly fee
The numbers that decide it
Four figures worth knowing by heart
A company's year runs on these four. Two of them are rates and two of them are dates.
19% / 25%Corporation tax, below £50,000 and above £250,000
26.5%The effective rate on profit between the two
9m + 1dAfter your year end, the tax is due
£1,500Late filing penalty at six months, doubled if you were late before
2026/27 figures. See key tax dates and the calculators for the full picture.
Your year
Almost none of it is a fixed calendar date
A company's deadlines hang off its own year end, which is why generic tax-date lists are close to useless for a director.
Your year endWhatever date you chose. Everything below is measured from it, which is why no two companies share a calendar.
+9 months, 1 dayCorporation tax payment due. Note this is before the return.
+9 monthsAnnual accounts due at Companies House.
+12 monthsCompany tax return (CT600) due at HMRC.
Your review dateConfirmation statement, once a year, whether or not anything changed.
Within 14 daysAny change of director, registered office or people with significant control.
Source: gov.uk Corporation Tax and Companies House guidance, checked July 2026. Yours are on your portal.
The one fact everything hangs off
The company's money is not your money
A limited company is a separate legal person. It owns its bank account, it owes its own tax, and the money in it is not yours until it has been paid to you in a way the law recognises: salary, dividend, expenses properly incurred, or interest and rent on something you have genuinely lent or let to it.
Almost every expensive problem we see in an owner-managed company traces back to that sentence not landing. Money taken out informally becomes a director's loan. A dividend voted when the reserves were not there is unlawful and repayable. A personal cost paid from the company account is either a benefit in kind or a disallowed expense, and sometimes both.
The upside is real and it is why people incorporate: you decide how much comes out and when, which is a genuine planning lever an employee does not have. It only works if the paperwork keeps up with the decisions, and the paperwork is the part we do.
Where it goes wrong
The five we see most
- Drawing money with no label on it
- If it is not salary, not a dividend and not a reimbursed expense, it is a loan from the company to you. Left outstanding nine months after the year end it attracts a charge on the company — refundable, but not for years.
- Dividends voted out of thin air
- A dividend can only come from distributable reserves. If the profit was not there, it is not a dividend, and HMRC can treat it as salary or as a loan. Board minute and voucher each time; it takes two minutes.
- Forgetting the second company
- The £50,000 and £250,000 corporation tax thresholds are divided by the number of associated companies. Two companies halve them, so the same profit can be taxed at a materially higher rate than a single company would pay.
- The filing that is public for ever
- A late filing penalty at Companies House starts at £150 and reaches £1,500 at six months, and it doubles if you were late the year before. The record stays on your public file, and it is the first thing a credit agency and a prospective buyer look at.
- Salary set once and never revisited
- The efficient salary moves with the National Insurance thresholds, and a company whose only employee is its sole director cannot claim the employment allowance. Last year's answer is not automatically this year's.
What taking money out costs
Salary and dividends, worked through
Taking £60,000 out of your own company
One director, no other employees, no other income, 2026/27. A £12,570 salary to use the personal allowance, and the rest as dividends.
- Salary
- £12,570
- Income tax on the salary — covered by the personal allowance
- £0
- Employer’s NI on the salary — 15% above £5,000, no employment allowance for a sole director
- £1,136
- Dividends
- £47,430
- Dividend tax at 10.75% on £37,200 in the basic band
- £3,999
- Dividend tax at 35.75% on the £9,730 above it
- £3,478
- Personal tax on £60,000 drawn
- £7,477
You keep £52,523, and the company has also paid £1,136 of employer’s NI to get the salary out. Change the split and both numbers move — which is the point, and why it is worth doing the arithmetic once a year rather than repeating last year's.
Worked through at 2026/27 rates from our own calculators, which follow gov.uk guidance checked in July 2026. An example, not advice — your figures will differ.
What we do about it
The company side, handled
The extraction plan
Salary, dividends and employer pension contributions worked out before the year end, when they can still change the answer.
Every deadline tracked
Accounts, CT600, the payment date nine months and a day after your year end, and the confirmation statement.
The paperwork that makes it legal
Board minutes, dividend vouchers, the register of members. Boring, quick, and the thing that stands up later.
The director's loan account, watched
You hear about it in month eight, not fourteen months later when a charge has attached to it.
Somebody to ring
A named accountant who knows the company, included rather than billed by the six minutes.
Questions
What people ask us
What does a limited company package include, and what does it not?
It normally covers bookkeeping, VAT returns where you are registered, payroll for up to two employees, statutory year-end accounts filed at Companies House, the Corporation Tax return, the confirmation statement and the directors' self assessment. FreeAgent is included, worth up to £330 a year. Outside the fee and quoted separately: catching up unfiled years, share reorganisations, company valuations, HMRC enquiries and regulated financial or legal advice. We do not carry out statutory audits. Your proposal sets both columns out line by line before you sign, which is the point at which to argue about scope.
How much does it cost?
You get a fixed monthly figure in writing after a 30-minute discovery call. The drivers are transaction volume, VAT registration and scheme, payroll headcount, how many entities there are, and the condition of the records coming across. Two companies at identical turnover can be a straightforward month or a forensic exercise. What is fixed is the fee once agreed, and there is no hourly charge for asking questions. If a published monthly number is what matters most to you, online-only firms provide exactly that, and for a simple company it can be a perfectly reasonable choice.
Should I take salary or dividends?
For most owner-directors, a modest salary set around the National Insurance thresholds with the balance as dividends. Salary is deductible for the company and protects your State Pension record; dividends carry no National Insurance but come out of profit that has already borne Corporation Tax. The right split depends on your other income, whether the Employment Allowance is available and how much profit you actually need to draw. The trap is dividends paid without distributable reserves — cash in the bank is not the same as retained profit, because some of it belongs to HMRC. Run the numbers on the salary and dividend calculator, then let us check it against your accounts.
What happens if I have taken money out that is not salary or dividend?
It goes to your director's loan account. If the account is overdrawn at the year end and not repaid within nine months and a day, the company pays a section 455 charge on the outstanding balance — refundable, but only once the loan is cleared, which can be years of working capital sitting with HMRC. An interest-free balance over £10,000 is also a benefit in kind reportable on a P11D. It is fixable, and the fix is usually a properly documented dividend or bonus before the deadline rather than after. Tell us early; the options narrow considerably once the year has closed.
Are Companies House filings included?
Yes. Every limited company package includes the confirmation statement and the routine statutory filings, and we track the dates rather than leaving you to remember them. Annual accounts are due at Companies House nine months after your year end, Corporation Tax is payable nine months and a day after it, and the CT600 is due twelve months after. Late accounts bring automatic penalties that double if you are late two years running, and the overdue status sits on your public record where lenders and customers can see it. That last consequence is usually the expensive one. Full detail is on the company secretarial page.
Can I switch mid-year, or should I wait for the year end?
You can switch at any point, and most people do not wait. Just after a year end is tidiest because there is less part-year data to migrate, but a mid-year move is routine: we request professional clearance and your records, take over the HMRC agent authorisation, and pick up VAT and payroll cycles without a gap. The one time to move quickly regardless of the calendar is when filings are already overdue or an accountant has gone quiet, because the penalties keep accruing while you decide. Check your existing engagement letter for notice terms and make sure work you have paid for has been delivered.
What if I have already missed a filing deadline?
Deal with it now — the penalties escalate on a timetable and the cheapest day to act is always today. For Companies House, late accounts start at £150 for a private company and rise with the delay, doubling if you were also late the previous year. For HMRC, a late CT600 brings its own penalties, and interest runs on unpaid Corporation Tax from the due date regardless. Appeals succeed only where there is a genuine reasonable excuse, and "the accountant did not tell me" is generally not one. We will establish exactly what is outstanding, file in the order that stops the bleeding, and tell you honestly what is and is not appealable.
Do you offer unlimited support, and what does that actually mean?
It means no hourly charge for asking a question, with a fair usage policy behind it, and a reply usually within one working day. In practice it covers the calls that matter: can I afford this hire, should I buy the van before the year end, what does this HMRC letter mean, is this dividend safe. What it does not cover is a piece of work with real cost attached — a restructure, an enquiry, a valuation — which gets quoted before it starts. If your questions are really a request for daily bookkeeping, we will say so and price that properly.
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