End of year accounts for a tiny Ltd

[oversteer]

The other half runs a little Plan B business that made about £1k profit last year. It's a Ltd co, mainly for liability reasons, so we have Co House and CT600 etc.

She's been getting £200-£500 quotes for the end of year accounts. There's only a few transactions, the accounts are really simple so I was thinking about doing the CT600/Co House bits myself. However, we have the iXBRL thing to worry about, and it seems that most of the software packages that create XBRL are not far off the cost of getting an accountant to do it! (e.g. VT Final Accounts is £200)

Anyone else been in a similar situation ?

[xoggoth]

I started looking at doing excel to iXBRL conversions but it is a nightmare. Technically it should be pretty simple as iXBRL is only very old fashioned HTML (lots of use of tables) with certain fields tagged in XBRL but getting the necessary information to avoid rejection is almost impossible. Cos Hse and HMRC seem only interested in helping businesses who can rip us off.

However, you don't need to convert if you are prepared to retype all the essential figures into the HMRC/Cos House crappy, bug-ridden PDF software. Not tried it but apparently if you do the CT600 first and choose the accounts option it gives you a file you can then submit to Co House. That means doing CT 3 months early of course.

I have seen Excel/iXBRL conversions for a lot less than £200. There's a very cheap online thing but found it a total hastle, you had to retype all the values into their sheet as it would not allow links to existing sheets. Just as quick to type into the CH/HMRC things.

Your best option would be to sign up to HMRC/Cos House if you haven't already and download their submission documents. Print them off and do corresponding spreadsheets highlighting only the few things that are relevant. Link to those from your calculation sheets, then in future it should be fairly easy to fill in their forms.

PS Apart from the changes they keep making just to annoy us obviously.

[oversteer]

Ah OK, so if you do the CT600 first you get a file that will be accepted by Co House ?

It's just an oddity for this year, hopefully next year her Plan B will be a full time thing !

[xoggoth]

Thats' what I understood when last doing CT600. Best check it out.

[VectraMan]

I tried to do one last year with the bug-ridden CT600 software, but couldn't get it to work and in the end did a paper return. A week after I'd submitted it HMRC's tech support replied saying they'd fixed my bug.

But assuming it does work, then yes use that and yes it does submit the stuff for Co House as part of the same package. Of course like all these things everything is explained in incomprehensible accountancy terms, so it's not as straightforward as it should be and you will end up tearing your hair out when it repeatedly tells you you've entered the wrong value into a calculated read-only field.

[oversteer]

There's also a downloadable Abbreviated Accounts PDF on the Companies House website. SO

- complete the CT600 on Govt gateway
- EITHER download the supplied PDF
- then submit it to Co House
- OR complete the Abbrev Acct one from Co House
- and Ensure you are registered for "Joint Filing" and then submit the accounts to Co House, who send them to HMRC too

?

[xoggoth]

Not heard of joint filing. It seems you can download CT600 and use that to create accounts for co hse but you don't have to submit the CT600 until it's due.

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/ct/ct-online/...int-filing.htm

[oversteer]

Well, I did it! I hope

It wasn't actually so bad, if you have a reasonable understanding of P&L and Balance Sheet basics.

You log on to HMRC's Corp Tax site, and download a PDF which has numerous steps that eventually end up submitting details to both Companies House and HMRC, generating accounts / CT600 that look in the correct format. A bit of hopping back and forth to make sure details line up, but it's surprisingly efficient.

An added complication was that Companies House expected accounts to a different period to HMRC, but this was due to it being the company's first year of trading. I just needed to call HMRC and they set the accounting dates for me. After it updated (overnight) I could download two PDFs, one for each period.

As things go it's probably the most efficient thing I've ever seen from HMRC.

[xoggoth]

It still takes ten times as long as it did four years ago before they started using these crappy PDF files and requiring you to fill in all the accounts and calculations instead of just uploading some pdfs you could output from Word/Excel. Must put some figures in three times.

Must be less helpful to them too as the P&L has so few categories of expense. Recently did accounts for missus's small business and had to bung everything in admin expenses, no other categories appropriate. Why no slot for home made Chinese dragon costumes for heaven's sake?