The Companies House pause is over, and your P&L goes on file in April 2028

In January, Companies House paused the biggest change to accounts filing in a generation, and most of the coverage read it as a reprieve. In June it quietly stopped being one. The reforms are going ahead, all of them, and they now have a date: April 2028.

That leaves the internet wrong about this subject twice over. The "act before April 2027" articles died with the January pause. The "delayed indefinitely" articles that replaced them died on 9 June, when the government confirmed the new timetable. If you searched for this last month and came away with either answer, you came away with a stale one.

Here is what was actually announced, and, more usefully, who it actually affects.

What lands in April 2028

Three changes matter for a small company. Accounts must be filed through commercial software, in a tagged format called iXBRL, and the web and paper routes close for accounts at the same time. Small companies and micro-entities must file a profit and loss account, which they have never had to do. And abridged accounts, the halfway house many small companies file today, are removed altogether.

There are further changes in the same package: a strengthened eligibility statement for companies claiming an audit exemption, a requirement that all the component parts of the accounts are filed together, and a limit on how often a company can shorten its accounting reference period. Real, but not the ones that change anyone's Tuesday.

April 2028: Software-only accounts filing begins
21 months: One full accounting year plus nine to prepare

The delay from April 2027 was granted so that every company gets one full accounting year, plus the nine months after it, under the current rules before the new ones apply. That is genuine slack. It is not a reason to file this year's accounts any differently. It is a reason to know which side of the change you are on.

If you have an accountant, this is mostly their problem

The honest first question is not "what software do I need". It is "who files my accounts now".

If an accountant prepares and files them, they almost certainly already file through commercial software that produces iXBRL, because that is how accounts production software has worked for years. When April 2028 arrives, your accounts will go in the same way they went in the year before. You will notice the profit and loss requirement, which is real and covered below, but the software mandate will pass you by entirely. Most limited companies are in this group, and most of the articles ranking for this subject are oddly reluctant to say so.

The reader with an actual decision is the director who files their own accounts through Companies House WebFiling. A dormant company kept for the name. A small company whose accounts are simple enough that the director does them in an evening. From April 2028 that route is closed for accounts, and the choice is between buying a piece of filing software or handing the job to an accountant. Companies House publishes a list of software providers, and the cheap end of that list is very cheap; for a dormant company the answer may be an hour and a small subscription. But it is a decision, it has a deadline, and nobody is going to make it for you.

One nuance worth having: WebFiling is closing for accounts, not closing. Confirmation statements, director changes and the rest stay on the web service. The company that files everything itself keeps doing so, except for the accounts.

The profit and loss question

The part that made headlines when these reforms were first proposed was small companies publishing their profit and loss: turnover and profit visible to any competitor, customer or neighbour who cared to look. The June announcement changed that. The P&L must be filed, but small companies and micro-entities can opt out of it being published on the public register.

Where a company opts out, the information does not vanish. Companies House, HMRC and law enforcement can still see it; that is much of the point of collecting it. What your competitors see is a different matter from what the state sees, and the opt-out only governs the first.

How the opt-out will actually work has not been published. The announcement says details will be confirmed in due course, and that is the entire state of public knowledge. Anyone currently selling certainty about the mechanism is ahead of the facts, and this post is not going to join them.

That method, judging a message by the route it arrived by rather than how official it sounds, is the one we set out when the MTD scammers were impersonating HMRC. It applies unchanged here.

The clock that bites first is not this one

A director reading this in 2026 has two Companies House dates in their life, and the further one is the louder one online. The nearer one is identity verification: existing directors must verify their identity by the company's first confirmation statement filed in the transition year, and the transition ends on 17 November 2026. That is this autumn, not 2028. If only one of the two gets your attention this month, it should be that one.

For the 2028 change, the useful preparation fits in three lines.

01Find out how last year's accounts were filed: by an accountant through software, or by you through WebFiling
02If an accountant files them, ask one question at your next year-end: are we ready for software-only filing and the P&L requirement, and does anything about our accounts change
03If you file them yourself, diary the decision for 2027: filing software from the Companies House list, or a quote from an accountant, and no later than your first accounts due after April 2028

We sit unusually close to this change. Our sister practice, Opus Accountancy, files accounts for a living, and we built its practice platform against the live Companies House API, so we see what happens to a filing after the button is pressed as well as before. If you are not sure which group you are in, or your company is the one still filing through WebFiling, ask us. It is a five-minute question in 2026 and a worse one in March 2028.

We work with businesses across Knutsford, Alderley Edge, Wilmslow, Altrincham, Stockport and Warrington, and remotely for clients anywhere in the UK.