I'm trying to file my Abbreviated Accounts for our small company on the Companies House website.
In previous years, I filled in the box for "Creditors - amounts falling due within one year" as a positive number if people did owe the company money, and the system knew to subtract the amount owed to the company from the company assets.
This year, I see the design of the form has changed. If I try to fill in the amount owed to the company as a positive number, the automatically calculated totals for the boxes labelled "Net current assets (liabilities)" and "Total assets less current liabilities" come out spectacularly wrong; the system seems to be ADDING the positive total for assets to the positive total for liabilities! However if I put in the amount owed to the company as a NEGATIVE number, those two automatically calculated boxes supply the correct totals.
"OK, fine," I think, "they want credits to be expressed as negatives now." I don't mind doing that but I would feel happier if I could find some instructions telling me about this change, or someone could confirm that that is the way they want it now.
This also brings up an extra problem - do they want capital to be expressed as a negative as well, given that like liabilities, it is a credit?
In our case this is a grand total of £1 Called Up Share Capital. Or possibly £-1?
(It doesn't help that I think we have been wrongly ignoring that £1 for the entire 17 years of our company's existence. But that's another story!)
- I rang the Companies House information centre number. The person who answered the call wanted to be helpful but quite clearly did not know what I was talking about.
- However after running an internet search I did find this question and answer from the CH community support forum:
"Error in the Automatic Calculator set up for the CREDITORs box
For the Abbreviated Accounts Balance Sheet, the automatic calculator has been set up incorrectly such that the sum entered into the CREDITORS box is added to the Current Assets - It should always be SUBTRACTED from the Total Current Assets to give the Net Current Assets. Therefore, I'm unable to submit my Abbreviated Accounts online until the problem is fixed by Companies House."
The reply from Kean Jones (official rep) was:
"Usability testing took place during the development phase of the web abbreviated accounts, during this phase the accepted convention for entering values for CREDITORS was to input the value as a negative figure.
To resolve the issue you are experiencing please enter this value as a negative figure. If this is done the net current assets should be calculated as expected.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused."
This still leaves me uncertain how to deal with capital - negative or positive?
The Shareholders' Funds side of the B/S is a separate calculation from the Net Worth side, and obviously, they should total the same. It's logical therefore that you should use positive numbers for Share Capital. Only if (for example) you are carrying losses forward in your P&L would you show a negative amount here.
Yes, that sounds logical. When I asked the original question I had it lodged in my head that they wanted us to use a *consistent convention* of negative numbers for credits, but there is no reason to suppose they are as obsessed with that sort of thing as I am.
I had looked at the little video you linked to, but on first viewing the bit where they put numbers in to the capital boxes passes too quickly for me to see. I viewed it again and pressed pause at the relevant point and those numbers were positive, so I'll go with that.
It is a bit annoying - why can't Companies House get what must surely be a fairly simple bit of programming, telling the system to perform a subtraction rather than an addition, right first time? They managed it on the old system. "Usability testing" of the new system is meant to GET RID of such glitches, surely?
User testing is pre live. (testing is unit, link, system, user / acceptance then live)
The question should be why is this showing up at all in the live environment!
Sounds as though someone somewhere has accidentally implemented test code in the live environment and now they're trying to back peddle on the assumption that those they are talking to don't understand things like the development life cycle.
__________________
Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
By the way, I did submit the accounts with capital as positive numbers. The accounts were approved instantly. I was almost insulted to think that after all my inner turmoil they weren't even seen by a human being!
