The End of Filleted Accounts: How ECCTA's Full P&L Mandate Will Reshape the Small-Company Register

When the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 (ECCTA) reached the statute book, headlines fixated on identity verification, the new failure-to-prevent-fraud offence, and the muscle given to the Registrar of Companies. The accounts-filing reforms tucked into sections 55 to 58 attracted comparatively little coverage. That looks, in retrospect, like a serious editorial misread.

From a commencement date the Department for Business and Trade has signalled for April 2027, the long-standing right of small and micro-entity companies to file abridged or filleted accounts at Companies House will be withdrawn. Every active company will have to file a full profit-and-loss account, every set of accounts will have to be delivered in software-tagged iXBRL, and the multi-version filing regime that filers and accountants have built workflows around since 2008 will be collapsed into a single route.

On the Companies House register at the end of 2025, the small-company population sat at roughly 3.1 million active entities, with a further 1.0 million classified as micro under section 384A of the Companies Act 2006. Around three quarters of those, on the registrar's own filing-mix data, currently deliver some form of reduced accounts. That is the population the reforms are aimed at — and the population about to lose its principal disclosure carve-out.

What is actually changing

A reminder of the regime ECCTA is dismantling. Under the existing Part 15 of the Companies Act 2006, a company that meets the small-company thresholds in section 382 (post-April 2025: turnover not more than £15 million, balance-sheet total not more than £7.5 million, headcount not more than 50, satisfying two of the three) can:

1. File an abridged balance sheet and abridged P&L if all members consent — fewer line items, no segmental analysis.
2. File filleted accounts that omit the profit-and-loss account and directors' report from the public copy entirely, sending only the balance sheet and notes to the registrar.
3. Claim the small-company audit exemption under section 477 if it also meets the audit thresholds.

Micro-entities under section 384A (turnover not more than £1 million, balance sheet not more than £500,000, headcount not more than 10) can go further still: a stripped-down balance sheet, no directors' report, no notes beyond the prescribed minimum.

ECCTA leaves the thresholds alone — the April 2025 uplift handled those — but rewrites the filing options. After commencement:

• The option to file abridged accounts will be abolished. Section 444(2A) of the Companies Act 2006, the source of that right, is repealed.
• The right to omit the profit-and-loss account from the public copy — the so-called filleting under section 444(1)(b) — is abolished.
• Every small and micro-entity company will have to file a full P&L on the public register, alongside the balance sheet, notes, and directors' report.
• Accounts will be iXBRL-tagged software-only filings. Paper filings, web filings via the legacy WebFiling service, and the joint Companies House / HMRC service in its current form will end.
• The right to claim audit exemption is retained, but companies must include an explicit eligibility statement on the balance sheet identifying which exemption they are claiming and confirming directors' acknowledgement of their duties.

The scaffolding for this sits in the Companies (Accounts and Reports) Regulations 2024 consultation response published in autumn 2025; the operational guidance is being phased through Companies House's transition programme, and software vendors have been given the schema definitions for the iXBRL taxonomies.

The filing-mix today, and what changes look like in numbers

Companies House does not publish a single neat dataset of how many companies use each filing route, but its annual Companies Register Activities and the registrar's quarterly transparency releases let you triangulate. The position roughly nine months out from commencement looks like this:

The filleted column is the one that vanishes. Roughly 2.4 million companies that today disclose nothing of their trading performance on the public register will, from April 2027, be required to publish a profit-and-loss account every year. The abridged column collapses into the full small-company route. The micro-entity column survives as a category, but the option to omit the P&L from the publicly filed copy disappears in line with the small-company change.

In aggregate, that is the largest single expansion of mandatory disclosure on the UK register since the small-company regime was introduced under the Companies Act 1981.

Why the reform was made — and the case against

The Department for Business and Trade's policy paper frames the change in three lines: filleted accounts have made the register less useful for due diligence, less useful for fraud prevention, and less useful for credit assessment. Trade-credit insurers and the major rating bureaux had been clear in their consultation responses that a balance sheet without a P&L is, for purposes of risk assessment, of marginal value. The Insolvency Service backed the change too, noting that the absence of trading information complicates director-disqualification investigations and the unwinding of phoenix-company patterns.

The counter-arguments are not trivial. The Federation of Small Businesses estimated in its 2025 response that an average small company will incur £280 to £620 in extra annual compliance costs once iXBRL-only filing and the additional disclosure requirements bed in, with the burden falling disproportionately on owner-managed businesses without in-house finance functions. Competitive concerns are real: a small specialist consultancy that today shields its margin from larger rivals via filleted filings will, from 2027, find that margin on the register of every contract opportunity. And the privacy argument cuts both ways — a husband-and-wife trading company will publish its trading performance to anyone with a Companies House login.

The registrar's reply, in essence: the public register is a public-policy instrument, not a competitive shield, and the UK is the outlier internationally. France, Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland and Spain all require full P&L disclosure for small entities; the EU's Accounting Directive (2013/34/EU) treats P&L publication as the default and member-state filleting derogations as the exception.

What filers should do between now and April 2027

A short, deliberately practical checklist:

1. Audit your current filing route. If your last set of accounts was filed under section 444(1)(b), you are in the population most affected. Pull your iXBRL filing receipt and confirm.
2. Talk to your software supplier. The new iXBRL taxonomies (FRS 102 Section 1A and FRS 105) are being released in staged drops through 2026. Anything still relying on the joint Companies House / HMRC web service needs a migration path.
3. Stress-test the disclosure. Rebuild last year's accounts as if the new regime applied. The most common surprise on the test runs we have seen is the visibility of directors' remuneration in micro-entity accounts under the revised disclosure schedule.
4. Consider distribution-policy implications. A profit-and-loss account on the register changes how visible your distributable reserves position is to creditors and counterparties. That is not a reason to delay dividends, but it is a reason to document them properly.
5. Check your year-end. Companies with an accounting reference date shortly after April 2027 will be the first to file under the new regime. Consider whether to align early — voluntary adoption is already permitted from October 2026.

The bigger picture: a register designed to be read

ECCTA's accounts reforms, taken together with mandatory director identity verification, the phasing-out of corporate directors, the new powers to query and reject filings, and the move to a software-only filing channel, point in one direction: a register that is no longer an inert document warehouse but a structured, queryable, machine-readable dataset of UK corporate activity.

The loss of filleted accounts is the price of that shift. For the genuine small-company filer it is a real cost, and one not to be brushed off. For the user of the register — the credit analyst, the compliance officer, the journalist, the procurement manager doing supplier due diligence — it is a long-overdue correction. From April 2027, every active company on the UK register will publish what it earned. Whether that is, on balance, a fair trade is a question the next two years of GSC indexing, FSB lobbying, and software-vendor pricing will quietly answer.