Accounting software for limited companies that does the work for you.

What does a limited company actually have to do?

A UK limited company is a separate legal person from you, the director. That separation is what protects your personal assets, but it is also what creates the paperwork. Because the company exists in its own right, it has to keep its own books, report its own profits, and file its own returns. As a director you are personally responsible for making sure that happens, even if you outsource the work.

The single most common source of confusion is that there are two separate filings, sent to two separate government bodies, and people assume one covers the other. It does not. You file annual accounts with Companies House, and you file a Corporation Tax return with HMRC. They draw on the same underlying numbers but they are distinct submissions, with distinct deadlines and distinct penalty regimes. Get one right and forget the other, and you are still fined.

On top of those two, most active companies also have a confirmation statement to file every year, VAT returns if turnover crosses the registration threshold, and PAYE submissions if the company pays anyone a salary, including the director. None of this is hard once it is set up, but it is relentless, and the calendar does not care that you had a launch this month.

It is worth being precise about what each obligation is for, because the language is genuinely confusing. Your annual accounts, sometimes called statutory accounts, are a formal financial statement of the company's position: a balance sheet showing what the company owns and owes, and for full accounts a profit and loss statement showing what it earned and spent. Most micro and small companies file abbreviated or filleted versions, so not every figure becomes public, but the accounts still have to exist and be accurate. Your Corporation Tax return, the CT600, is a separate document that takes those accounts, adds the tax adjustments HMRC requires, and arrives at the tax the company owes. The two filings share a foundation but they are not interchangeable.

The confirmation statement is different again. It is not about money at all. Once a year you confirm to Companies House that the public record of your company is correct: the registered office, the directors, the shareholders and the people with significant control. It is quick, but it is mandatory, and forgetting it is one of the most common reasons a company ends up flagged for strike-off. AccountsOS keeps the date in front of you so it never slips.

This is exactly the work AccountsOS takes off your plate. The bookkeeping happens as money moves, the deadlines are pulled in automatically, and the filings are drafted for you to review. You can read our full limited company tax guide for a deeper walk through every obligation.

What are the key filing deadlines for a limited company?

Every deadline below is anchored to your accounting reference date, which is usually the anniversary of the month you incorporated. As a worked example, take a company with a year-end of 31 March 2026. Its key dates land like this: Corporation Tax payment by 1 January 2027, accounts at Companies House by 31 December 2026, and the CT600 return by 31 March 2027. Notice that you have to pay the tax before you file the return that calculates it, which trips up a lot of first-time directors.

Companies House late filing penalties start at £150 for accounts up to one month late and rise to £1,500 for accounts more than six months late, and the penalty doubles if you file late two years running. HMRC charges a £100 penalty the moment a Corporation Tax return is a day late, another £100 at three months, and then a percentage of the unpaid tax after six and twelve months. Interest also runs on Corporation Tax paid late. The deadlines are not negotiable, which is why AccountsOS pulls them in for you the moment you connect your company.

There is one more wrinkle worth knowing in your first year of trading. Your first accounting period is often longer than twelve months, because Companies House sets your first accounting reference date to the end of the month you incorporated, a year later. A company incorporated on 14 March 2026 will typically have a first period running to 31 March 2027, which is twelve months and a bit. HMRC, however, only taxes a maximum of twelve months at a time, so your first long period is split into two Corporation Tax returns: one for the first twelve months and a short one for the remaining days. It catches almost every new director out.

With AccountsOS, your Companies House dates sync automatically every day and appear on your deadline board. Finn nudges you well ahead of each one, not the week it is due, so a filing never sneaks up on you. You can see your live obligations at any time without logging into two different government portals, and the software handles the first-year period split for you rather than leaving you to discover it the hard way.

How much Corporation Tax does a limited company pay?

Corporation Tax is charged on your company's taxable profit, which is your income minus your allowable costs, capital allowances and reliefs. For the financial year from April 2026 the rates are unchanged from the structure introduced in 2023. Companies with profits up to £50,000 pay the small profits rate of 19 percent. Companies with profits over £250,000 pay the main rate of 25 percent. In between, from £50,000 to £250,000, you pay 25 percent but get marginal relief, which tapers the effective rate up smoothly so there is no cliff edge.

As a worked example, a company with £120,000 of taxable profit sits in the marginal band. It pays the 25 percent main rate of £30,000 and then receives marginal relief, which for this profit level brings the effective rate down to roughly 23.7 percent, a bill of about £28,500 rather than the headline £30,000. The marginal relief calculation is fiddly to do by hand because the £50,000 and £250,000 thresholds are reduced if you have associated companies or a short accounting period.

It is worth understanding that taxable profit is not the same as the profit in your bank account or even the profit in your accounts. HMRC requires adjustments: you add back costs that are not allowable, such as client entertaining and depreciation, then deduct capital allowances on qualifying assets, including the Annual Investment Allowance, which lets you write off most equipment purchases in full in the year you buy them. A company that spent £15,000 on computers and equipment can typically deduct the whole lot from its taxable profit immediately, which is a substantial saving most directors do not realise they can claim.

AccountsOS tracks your taxable profit as it builds through the year from your general ledger, applying these adjustments as it goes, so you are never surprised by the bill in January. You can model it any time with our Corporation Tax calculator, and Finn will tell you in plain English how much to set aside each month so the cash is there when payment is due. No more discovering in December that the money you spent in October was actually next year's tax.

What is the best salary and dividend split for a director?

Because a limited company is taxed separately from you, you choose how to take money out of it, and that choice changes how much tax you and the company pay. The two main routes are a salary, which is a deductible expense for the company and taxed as employment income for you, and dividends, which are paid out of post-tax profit and taxed at lower rates than salary. Most director-shareholders use a blend: a modest salary up to the personal allowance, then dividends on top.

The 2026/27 dividend rules have tightened. The tax-free dividend allowance is now just £500, down from £2,000 a few years ago. Above that allowance, dividends are taxed at 8.75 percent in the basic rate band, 33.75 percent in the higher rate band, and 39.35 percent in the additional rate band. The personal allowance remains £12,570. Here is a typical single-director split for 2026/27.

In this example the director draws around £50,270 in total: £12,570 of salary plus roughly £37,700 of dividends. The salary reduces the company's Corporation Tax bill because it is a deductible expense, while the dividends are taxed at only 8.75 percent in your hands once you pass the small allowance. The exact optimum shifts if you have other income, a student loan, want to make pension contributions through the company, or have a profit level that pushes you into the higher-rate band, where dividends jump to 33.75 percent.

This is precisely the kind of decision where waiting three days for an accountant costs you money. Finn models the split against your actual profit and recommends the most efficient mix, and you can try the numbers yourself with our salary and dividend calculator. Crucially, dividends can only be paid out of distributable profit, so AccountsOS checks that the company actually has the reserves before you draw, keeping you on the right side of company law.

When does a limited company have to register for VAT?

Your company must register for VAT once its taxable turnover passes £90,000 in any rolling 12-month period, or if you expect to cross that threshold in the next 30 days alone. Once registered, you charge VAT on your sales, reclaim VAT on your purchases, and submit a VAT return, normally every quarter. You can also register voluntarily below the threshold if reclaiming input VAT on your costs is worth it, which is common for companies selling to other VAT-registered businesses.

Every VAT-registered company is inside Making Tax Digital for VAT, which means you must keep digital records and submit returns through HMRC-recognised software rather than typing figures into the HMRC website. This has been mandatory since 2022 and there is no opting out. AccountsOS calculates your nine-box VAT return straight from your bookkeeping, supports both standard and flat-rate schemes, and submits it to HMRC under MTD.

For more on how MTD specifically affects companies, see our dedicated guide on Making Tax Digital for limited companies. Note that MTD for Corporation Tax has not yet been mandated, so for now MTD only touches your company through VAT.

What expenses can a limited company claim?

Every pound of allowable expense reduces your taxable profit, and every pound of taxable profit you remove saves you 19 to 25 percent in Corporation Tax. That is real money, and it is money most directors leave behind simply because the receipt never made it into the books. The test for a business expense is that it is incurred wholly and exclusively for the purposes of the trade. Get into the habit of capturing everything, and let the software decide what qualifies.

Common allowable costs for a small company include staff and director salaries, software and subscriptions, professional fees, business travel and mileage, a proportion of home-office costs if you work from home, business insurance, marketing and advertising, equipment and capital allowances on assets like computers, and employer pension contributions, which are particularly tax-efficient because they are deductible for the company and not taxed as your income. Some costs are specifically blocked, such as client entertaining, which is never deductible for Corporation Tax, and fines, which is why a human eye, or in this case an AI one, matters at categorisation time.

This is where AccountsOS earns its keep day to day. Forward a receipt by email, snap it on your phone, or connect your bank, and the AI extracts the supplier, amount and date, categorises it correctly, and matches it to the bank transaction. If something looks like client entertainment rather than a deductible meal, Finn flags it. You stop guessing what is claimable, and you stop losing relief because a coffee receipt faded in your wallet. Ask Finn "what have I spent on software this year?" and you get the answer instantly, categorised and ready for your accounts.

Why does year-end feel so stressful, and how do you fix it?

Year-end is stressful for one reason: the books were never kept properly during the year, so everything happens at once at the end of it. The classic pattern is a shoebox, or a folder of bank statements and a spreadsheet, that gets handed to an accountant in the ninth month, who then spends three weeks reconstructing twelve months of activity, asking you questions you cannot remember the answers to, and presenting a tax bill you have not budgeted for. The dread is not really about the accounts. It is about the surprise.

The fix is to keep the books live, so year-end is a review rather than a reconstruction. When every transaction is categorised as it happens, every receipt is captured at the point of spend, and your Corporation Tax estimate updates every time money moves, the year-end accounts are simply a snapshot of a ledger that has been correct all along. There is nothing to dig up because nothing was ever left undone. You know your tax bill months ahead, so the cash is set aside and the January payment is a non-event.

That is the model AccountsOS is built around. Finn prepares your FRS 105 micro-entity statutory accounts from the running ledger, flags anything that does not reconcile before it becomes a problem, and walks you through the Companies House and HMRC submissions when they are due. You review the figures and file with confidence. The dread goes away because the surprise goes away.

Limited company or sole trader: what changes for your accounts?

If you used to be a sole trader, incorporating changes your accounting obligations significantly. A sole trader files one Self Assessment return a year and pays Income Tax and National Insurance on profit. A limited company is a separate entity that pays Corporation Tax, files at Companies House, and pays its director through salary and dividends. The trade-off is more admin in exchange for tax efficiency and limited liability once profits grow. The table below summarises the difference.

The headline tax saving for a limited company comes from paying Corporation Tax at 19 to 25 percent rather than Income Tax at up to 45 percent, then drawing the rest as dividends taxed at lower rates than salary. But that saving only materialises if the books are kept properly, the dividends are documented, and the filings are on time, which is the whole reason this admin exists. AccountsOS is built to make the limited company structure pay off without the structure eating your week.

What are a director's legal responsibilities?

As a director you must keep adequate accounting records, file accurate accounts and returns on time, keep the company's money separate from your own, declare dividends properly out of distributable profit, and tell Companies House about changes such as a new registered office or a change of director. You are personally accountable for these duties under the Companies Act, and ignorance is not a defence. This is the part of running a company that nobody enjoys and everybody underestimates.

One duty that catches directors out is the handling of money between you and the company. Because the company is a separate legal person, you cannot simply take cash out as you would from a sole-trader bank account. Money you take that is not salary, dividend or a repayment of money you lent the company is treated as a director's loan, and if that loan is overdrawn at year-end there can be a tax charge on the company of 33.75 percent of the balance, plus a benefit-in-kind charge on you. Keeping a clean record of what is salary, what is dividend and what is a loan is not optional, and doing it in a spreadsheet after the fact is how mistakes happen.

AccountsOS lightens this load in several ways. It keeps your accounting records in a proper double-entry general ledger automatically, so the underlying figures are always defensible. It separates salary, dividends and director's loans cleanly so you can see your director's loan account position at a glance. It maintains an audit trail of every transaction, document and dividend. And it gives you a single place to see what is due and what has been filed, so the burden of remembering does not sit in your head.

How AccountsOS handles your limited company accounts

AccountsOS is an AI-native accounting platform built around Finn, your AI accountant. Finn does not just store your numbers, it actively does the work a high-street accountant would, instantly and in plain English. Here is how each pain maps to what the software does for you.

The difference from a traditional accountant is speed and access. Your books are live, not reconstructed once a year from a shoebox of receipts. Your questions are answered in seconds, not in three working days. And your filings are drafted for you to check, not held hostage until you have paid the invoice. If you are currently paying £150 to £300 a month for an accountant you rarely speak to, AccountsOS does the recurring work for £20 a month and is there the moment you have a question.

It is fair to ask whether software can really replace a qualified accountant, and the honest answer is that for most micro and small limited companies it can do the recurring work that takes up the bulk of an accountant's time: the bookkeeping, the VAT returns, the deadline management, the Corporation Tax tracking and the straightforward statutory accounts. What software does not replace is bespoke advice on a genuinely unusual situation, a company sale, a complex group structure, or a thorny HMRC dispute. The right mental model is that AccountsOS keeps your books impeccable all year for £20 a month, and if you ever do need an adviser for a one-off question, you walk in with clean, current numbers rather than a shoebox, which makes that advice cheaper and faster too.

If you want the full picture of how AccountsOS stacks up against a human practice, read replacing your accountant with AccountsOS. And if you are migrating from another tool, the AI maps your existing chart of accounts across automatically, so switching is a job for an afternoon, not a fortnight.

Getting set up takes about ten minutes