The April 2028 Companies House accounts reform: what it changes in how you produce accounts

What was confirmed, and what it replaced

The accounts reforms sit inside the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 and were originally due to land in April 2027. In January 2026 the government paused them for further review, with no replacement date given — which is where most of the commentary still sitting online stops. On 9 June 2026 Companies House and the Department for Business and Trade confirmed how the reforms will actually be implemented, and set the date at 1 April 2028, following what the announcement describes as extensive engagement with stakeholders on the burden some of the original proposals placed on small companies.

The substance of the reform is largely what was originally proposed, with one material concession added during the pause: a publication opt-out for the profit and loss account. The table below is the shape of it.

Two things worth separating from that table. First, the software-only requirement applies to accounts filings specifically — WebFiling stays open and fully supported for confirmation statements, director and PSC changes, and registered office updates, so this is not a wholesale shutdown of the free service. Second, the change is scoped to Companies House filing. It does not touch what a client reports to HMRC on their tax return, which is a separate filing built from the same underlying figures.

The part that actually changes your production line

The instinct is to read “no more abridged accounts” as a large increase in accounting work, and for most practices it mostly isn’t. You were very likely already preparing a full profit and loss account for nearly every small company client — the directors need it to run the business, you need it to complete the corporation tax return, and your accounts-production software generates it as a matter of course. Abridging was a presentation choice applied at the filing step, not a shortcut in the preparation work. For most clients, the underlying accounting does not get bigger in 2028.

What is genuinely new is a decision, repeated for every small and micro company client, every year: publish the P&L on the public register, or use the opt-out. That decision did not exist before because abridging made it moot. From 2028 it exists for every one of those clients, and somebody in your firm has to raise it, record the answer, and apply it correctly at the point of filing.

Take an illustrative example — a invented 30-partner-equivalent practice, not a real client of ours. The firm has 240 small and micro company clients, of whom roughly 200 currently file abridged or filleted accounts specifically because a director doesn’t want competitors, landlords or a disgruntled ex-business-partner reading their margin off Companies House. Today that preference is satisfied automatically by the filing format the firm chooses. From April 2028 it has to be satisfied by a tick that somebody asks for, on purpose, for each of those 200 clients, every single year — because the detail of the opt-out mechanism has not been published yet, there is a real risk it defaults to “publish” unless actively set otherwise. A firm that treats this as a one-off mailshot in March 2028 will spend that month fielding calls from directors who have just discovered their numbers are public. A firm that builds the question into the engagement letter and the year-end checklist well before then asks it once, in writing, and never has the conversation under pressure.

The filing-room problem: WebFiling and paper close for everyone, on the same day

The second change is less about judgement and more about plumbing. Most practices have a residual slice of filings — dormant companies, the simplest micro accounts, the odd one-off — that still goes through the free WebFiling service or, rarer now, on paper, rather than through the accounts-production software used for everything else. That fallback has no size exemption and no phasing-in by company type: from 1 April 2028, every accounts filing, for every company regardless of size or complexity, has to go through commercial software that produces iXBRL-tagged output. There is no simplified route left for the straightforward cases.

Companies House has said it will publish a list of compatible software providers on GOV.UK to help with the transition, which is useful but doesn’t remove the work: someone still has to confirm your existing accounts-production package actually tags and files correctly for every entity type you handle — including the dormant and micro-entity filings that may currently go through WebFiling precisely because nobody thought they were worth routing through the main system. A gap there is invisible until the first filing after April 2028 bounces, which is a worse place to discover it than a test run eighteen months earlier.

What to do with the time you actually have

Several of the details — the exact mechanics of the opt-out, the new limit on shortening the accounting reference date — are still to be set out in secondary legislation and Companies House guidance, and will likely land through 2027. That is a reasonable excuse to wait on those two specific points. It is not a reason to wait on everything, because most of the useful work here doesn’t depend on the missing detail:

• Measure the fallback. Pull a count of how many of last year’s filings went through WebFiling or paper rather than your main accounts-production software, and for which entity types. That number is your conversion project, and it is better sized now than discovered filing by filing in early 2028.
• Confirm your software’s coverage, in writing, from the supplier. Ask specifically about iXBRL tagging for micro-entity and dormant accounts, not just standard small-company filings — that is where gaps tend to hide, as covered in how to choose practice-management software.
• Add the publication question to onboarding and the annual year-end checklist now, for every small and micro client, so that by 2028 asking it is already a habit rather than a scramble — the same discipline that makes onboarding consistent in the first place.
• Flag the strengthened audit exemption statement to whoever currently signs off exemption on your clients’ behalf, alongside the capacity work already under way for the 2025 audit threshold rise — the two changes land on an overlapping set of clients and are worth planning together rather than as separate projects.
• Put a named owner and a date on it. This is a one-off, firm-wide change with a hard date behind it — the same shape of problem as Companies House ID verification, a different register entry but the identical failure mode: a task with no obvious single owner defaults to nobody, until the deadline makes it everybody’s emergency at once.

Why this sits on a COO’s desk, not just a technical one

None of this is difficult technically. The accounting doesn’t change, the tax position doesn’t change, and the software vendors will mostly handle the iXBRL mechanics without you having to understand the format in any depth. What makes it a genuine operational risk is timing: eighteen months out, it competes for attention with filing deadlines that are due this week, and loses every time, which is exactly how firms end up doing this kind of thing in a panic the quarter before it bites. Putting it on a quarterly operating review as a standing line — reviewed, not reacted to — is the only reliable way a stretched practice gets ahead of something with this much runway. It is the kind of forward-looking item Optivo’s Monthly COO keeps on a running list precisely because a regulatory change with 21 months’ notice is the easiest kind to get right, and the easiest kind to leave until it isn’t.