Filleting and abridging are two different accounts exemptions

The record

A UK company qualifying as small under the Companies Act 2006 can reduce what it files publicly at Companies House while still owing HM Revenue and Customs, and its own members, a full set of accounts. Companies House's own filing guidance sets the small-company thresholds at any two of: turnover of £15 million or less, £7.5 million or less on the balance sheet, or 50 employees or less. A small company can use the audit exemption, and can choose whether or not to send a copy of the director's report and profit and loss account to Companies House.

That director's choice to omit the profit and loss account and directors' report is the mechanism practitioners call filleting. It sits in section 444 of the Companies Act 2006, which says directors must deliver a balance sheet but may also deliver the profit and loss account and directors' report, leaving the rest out of the public record.

What the documents establish

Section 444 keeps a second, separate mechanism distinct from filleting: abridged accounts. Under section 444(2A), a company may only send Companies House a simplified, abridged balance sheet or profit and loss account where all the members of the company have consented, and the directors must deliver a statement recording that consent. Filleting needs no member vote; it is simply a director's choice not to send certain documents at all. Abridging changes the form of what is sent, and only with unanimous member sign-off. Companies House's own guidance folds both into one plain-English description, that sending abridged accounts means less information about a company will be publicly available, which is accurate but does not, on its own, separate the two statutory routes.

The operating read

Editorially, a founder reading a competitor's or supplier's filed accounts should check which route was used before drawing conclusions from a thin public filing. A company that filleted its accounts still prepared full statutory accounts, and HMRC and its own members hold that full version; only the Companies House copy is reduced. A company that abridged its accounts additionally needed every member's consent: it means shareholders agreed to less public disclosure, not that less information exists. Neither route says whether accounts were audited; that turns on the separate audit exemption.

What to check before you decide

Before treating a small company's slim Companies House filing as the full financial picture, check the following.

• Does the filing itself, or its cover note, say whether it is filleted, abridged, or both, and does that match what the company's own members' consent records show?
• Is the company within the current turnover, balance-sheet and employee thresholds for the small companies regime, or has it grown past them since the last filing?
• Would the full accounts held by HMRC or the company's own members change the reading a public filing alone suggests?

Filleting and abridging both shrink the public record, not the accounts a company actually prepares. Reading one as if it were the whole file overstates how little a small company is required to disclose.