Companies House Profit and Loss Filing 2028: What Changes for Xero Users
The filleted accounts era is ending, one 21-month notice period at a time.
For twenty years, "filing accounts" and "disclosing your P&L" have been two different things for small UK companies. You'd close the year in Xero, hand a full set to the directors, then file a stripped-down version at Companies House — filleted accounts, no profit and loss, no director's report, just enough to satisfy the letter of the Companies Act. Competitors couldn't see your margins. Your bank could, if you sent them the real thing. Everyone else got the redacted version.
That era has an end date now. In June 2026, Companies House confirmed the reform it paused earlier in the year is back on, with implementation set for April 2028. Small and micro companies will have to file a full profit and loss account. Filleted accounts, as a filing option, are going away.
What's actually changing, and what isn't
Get the nuance right here, because it matters for how you talk to clients.
Every company will have to submit a full P&L to Companies House. Small and micro entities currently exempt from this can't opt out from April 2028. The abridged and filleted formats — where you file a shortened balance sheet and skip the income statement entirely — stop being valid filing options.
Publication is opt-out, not automatic. This is the detail that got lost in a lot of the early "your competitors will see your margins" panic, and it cuts the other way from how most people assume it works. Small and micro companies get the option to opt out of having their P&L published on the public register — but the default is publication. Do nothing, and it goes up alongside the balance sheet, same as it does for everyone else. Keeping it private is a step someone has to actively take, client by client, every filing. That's a compliance task, not a background protection.
Software-only filing becomes mandatory for everyone, small companies included. WebFiling and paper submissions are being phased out in favour of commercial software filing with accounts tagged in iXBRL. If your current process for a micro client involves anyone typing figures into a Companies House web form, that process has an expiry date.
This sits alongside — and is easy to confuse with — the separate identity verification requirement for directors and PSCs under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act, which is already rolling out. It started in November 2025, and the real deadline for each existing director or PSC is their company's next confirmation statement — with 17 November 2026 as the outer backstop for anyone who hasn't hit one yet. Two different reforms, same root legislation, landing in the same conversations with clients. Worth being precise about which is which — and about whose deadline is actually confirmation-statement-shaped versus fixed — when you brief people.
The part that actually costs you time
Filing a full P&L sounds like a formatting change. For a lot of small company clients, it isn't.
Xero's chart of accounts is built around how the business actually tracks its numbers — sales by channel, costs by department, whatever mapping made sense when the file was set up. Statutory P&L format under FRS 102 Section 1A is built around required line items: turnover, cost of sales, administrative expenses, in a specific structure with specific groupings. Getting from one to the other has always meant someone — usually a manager or partner, because it needs judgement — remapping the trial balance by hand before anything gets filed.
Firms have been able to skip a chunk of that work for small clients because filleted accounts didn't require a fully reconciled P&L in filing-ready format, just a balance sheet and notes. From April 2028, that shortcut closes. Every client that used to get the abbreviated treatment now needs the full remap, every year, on top of everything else already landing in the same window — the Section 1A disclosure expansion that took effect for periods starting January 2026 added going concern statements, related party disclosures with no more "normal market terms" exemption, and lease and revenue recognition notes that a lot of small company accounts simply didn't carry before.
Do that by hand across a client bank of eighty small companies and you've turned a formatting nuance into a genuine capacity problem, right as software-only filing removes the option to route around it manually.
Where this leaves firms running on Xero
While this isn't a reason to panic two years out, it is a reason to stop treating "produce a statutory P&L" as a once-a-year manual exercise you'll figure out closer to the deadline.
The firms that come out of this fine are the ones that build the mapping once — a proper trial balance to statutory-format bridge, done at the chart of accounts level rather than reconstructed in Excel every March — and then run every client through it consistently. The firms that don't will be doing exactly what they do today, except now every client needs it, not just the ones that were never eligible for filleted accounts in the first place.
That's the gap Cheetah sits in — statutory-format financial statements generated directly from live Xero data, with the mapping logic built once and applied across your whole client list instead of rebuilt by hand each time a filing deadline moves. If you're already dreading what an eighty-client small-company bank looks like under mandatory P&L filing, it's worth a look before 2028 sneaks up on you.
What to do between now and 2028
Nobody needs a full remediation plan yet — the date is confirmed, but Companies House has built in a 21-month runway to get there, and the last version of this reform got paused once already, so there's no need to sprint. But three things are worth doing now rather than later:
- Audit which of your small and micro clients currently file filleted or abridged accounts, because that's your affected list.
- Check whether your accounts production software already outputs proper iXBRL-tagged statutory format, or whether that's a gap you're currently filling manually.
- Separate the P&L filing conversation from the director ID verification conversation when you brief clients — conflating the two reforms is the easiest way to have that briefing go sideways.
None of this needs solving this quarter. It does need to be on the list before it's urgent.
A finance professional turned product builder, Jarvin has built hundreds of reports by hand and knows what financial and operational reporting demands: customisability, auditability, scalability, and security. Having automated that work reliably, he's now helping advisory firms and finance teams do the same.
