Administration
Compliance and operations
Company administration, tax digitalisation and the controls that keep a small business filing on time without a full-time finance function.
Every company carries a set of obligations that are individually simple and collectively easy to drop: confirmation statements, annual accounts, VAT returns, payroll submissions, and the digital record-keeping rules that now sit underneath them.
None of it is difficult. All of it is dated, and the penalties attach to the date rather than the intent. This service puts the obligations on a calendar with an owner, gets the record-keeping into a state where the filing is a by-product of normal work, and leaves you with something that keeps running when the person who set it up is on holiday.
What you get
Named artefacts, not a slide pack. Each one is a thing your team can open, run, or hand to an auditor.
| Artefact | What it contains |
|---|---|
| Obligations calendar | Every statutory deadline for every entity, with a named owner and a reminder that fires early enough to act on. |
| Record-keeping setup | Bookkeeping configured so that quarterly and annual filings are assembled from records that already exist rather than reconstructed. |
| Digital record compliance | Records held in the form Making Tax Digital requires, with the digital links between them intact rather than bridged by copy and paste. |
| Entity structure review | Where there is more than one company: what sits where, how money moves between them, and whether that is documented. |
| Controls | Approval thresholds, separation of duties where headcount allows, and a written record of who can commit the company to what. |
| Remediation plan | Where something is already late: the sequence to get current, and what to expect from the relevant authority. |
How it runs
01 · 1 week
Frame
Every entity, every obligation, current status. Frequently the first useful output is simply an accurate list.
02 · 1–2 weeks
Prove
One filing cycle run the new way, end to end, so the process is tested against a real deadline rather than a hypothetical one.
03 · 4–8 weeks
Build
The rest of the calendar, the record-keeping, the controls and the documentation.
04 · 1–2 weeks
Hand over
Owners named, reminders live, and the first cycle after handover run by your people with us on call rather than in the chair.
What we use
Chosen per engagement against your constraints. We have no reseller relationships and no incentive to recommend one of these over another.
Accounting
Filing
Record keeping
Controls
What we do not do
Knowing where our usefulness stops saves everyone a procurement cycle.
- We are not accountants or tax advisers and we do not provide tax advice. We build the operating side around your accountant, and where a question is genuinely a tax question we will tell you to ask them.
- We are not a recognised Making Tax Digital software vendor. We have built filing software against the HMRC APIs, which is why we understand the requirements, but we do not hold production recognition and do not claim to.
- We do not sign filings on your behalf. Directors carry personal responsibility for statutory filings and that responsibility should stay visibly with them.
- We do not help anyone conceal a position from HMRC or Companies House. If something is late or wrong, the work is to get it current and disclosed.
Questions we are asked
Do we still need an accountant?
Yes. This service does not replace one and is not regulated to. What it does is stop your accountant spending billable hours reconstructing records at year end, which normally makes it cheaper to have one. The clean division is that they advise on the tax position and file the statutory accounts, and we make sure the underlying records and deadlines are in a state that supports it.
What do you actually know about Making Tax Digital?
We built filing software against the HMRC Income Tax APIs: obligations, quarterly updates, annual summary, calculations and the fraud prevention header requirements that sit on every call. That product is documented in our portfolio, so you can read the engineering detail rather than take the claim on trust.
We have already missed a deadline. Is that recoverable?
Usually, and the recovery is almost always better than the alternative of leaving it. Penalties for late filing are largely mechanical and escalate with time, so acting quickly matters more than acting perfectly. We would help you get current and then fix whatever made it possible to miss, which is normally that the deadline had no owner.
We run several companies. Does this cover that?
Yes, and the multi-entity case is where it tends to earn its keep. The recurring issues are money moving between companies without documentation, one entity quietly funding another, and obligations for the smaller company being forgotten because attention sits with the trading one. We run more than one entity ourselves, so this is a problem we have had to solve for our own group.
Start with what is in the way.
Most of this work is shaped by the obstacle rather than the ambition. A deal that keeps stalling at the same stage, a process nobody owns, a product that will not sell, a decision that has been open for months. Tell us yours and we will say honestly whether we are the right people for it.