Your accounting reference date (ARD) is the last day of your company’s financial year. Sometimes referred to as a company’s ‘year end’, the ARD is the date your annual accounts should be made up to.
Companies House will set your first accounting reference date. It will fall on the anniversary of the last day of the month of company registration. Your ARD will be the same every year unless you choose to change it.
Below, we discuss where to find your accounting reference date, how to work out your company’s financial year, when to file your accounts, and what to do if you need to change your ARD.
As soon as your company is incorporated (registered), Companies House will work out your accounting reference date and send it to you by email.
You will also find your ARD online by searching your company’s record via Companies House service. To do so, simply follow these steps:
The ‘due by’ date listed underneath the ARD is the deadline for filing your annual accounts at Companies House.
Your company’s financial year will begin when it is incorporated at Companies House. It will end the following year, on the last day of the month, on which the anniversary of company registration falls.
The ARD will be the same yearly unless you change your company’s year end by shortening or extending its financial year.
Normally, a financial year will be exactly 12 months long. However, as you may have noticed from the above example, your company’s first financial year might span a slightly longer period. It all depends on which day of the month you set up your company.
If you don’t change your financial year, your accounts will always cover 12 months after the first year, ending on the same ARD.
After your company’s financial year ends, you must prepare annual accounts and deliver them to Companies House and HMRC by certain deadlines.
Your accounts should be made up to the accounting reference date. This means that the financial information reported in the accounts should cover the entire financial year up to and including the ARD.
However, you have the option to make up your accounts to a date up to 7 days on either side of the accounting reference date.
The filing deadline for delivering annual accounts to Companies House is:
Accounts for HMRC will be sent as part of your Company Tax Return . The filing deadline is 12 months after the end of your accounting period for Corporation Tax. This may or may not be the same 12-month period covered by your accounts.
Changing your accounting reference date is possible by making your company’s financial year shorter or longer than 12 months – as long as your annual accounts are not already overdue.
You can only make such changes for the current financial year or the one immediately prior. Changing your ARD will also change your annual accounts filing deadline (unless you are lengthening your first financial year), and it will typically affect your accounting period for Corporation Tax .
You can shorten your financial year by any time and as often as you like. However, you may only lengthen your financial year:
To change your ARD, you must complete and file Companies House form AA01, either online or by post.
Alternatively, you can use Rapid Formations’ free Online Client Portal to view all of your company details, keep track of your filing deadlines, and update important information at Companies House.
We hope you have found this blog interesting. lease leave a comment below if you have any questions.
If you would like to register a limited company , the best place to start is Rapid Formations homepage. There, you can check if your preferred company name is available to use.