The Companies Act 2006 rules on keeping, preparing and filing company accounts — and the penalties that follow when a company gets it wrong.
Behind every set of company accounts sits a chain of statutory duties, and a break at any link carries criminal and civil consequences. This chapter starts with the core record-keeping obligations: who is responsible, what the records must contain, who may inspect them, how long they must be kept, and the role of the accounting reference date. It then works through the size categories that determine a company's reporting burden, the audit exemptions and the shareholding that can override them, and the approval and signing steps before accounts are filed. It closes with the filing concessions for small companies, the deadlines for private and public companies, the two types of late-filing penalty, and the further consequences poor records can trigger in insolvency.
