Companies House

Change to acknowledgements of receipt via the Document Exchange Service (DX)

Companies House has been reviewing its postal procedures for acknowledgements of receipt of mail.

As a Trading Fund, Companies House must operate on the basis of cost recovery. We do therefore, continue to look critically at our processes and practices to ensure we are constantly driving efficiencies into the organisation and achieving our year on year efficiency improvements.

We receive post via Royal Mail and the Document Exchange Service (DX) and regularly customers request acknowledgement of receipt of post using these services.

Traditionally we have barcoded the DX acknowledgement cards with the date of receipt and returned these via the DX service. However, the costs are increasing substantially and as a result the organisation can no longer absorb these costs. We will cease receipting of mail via the DX service with effect from 1 August 2012.

DX presenters will of course be able to continue to request acknowledgements, but the service will be aligned to that for our Royal Mail customers as follows:

• all requests for acknowledgements of receipt of mail should be stated clearly in a letter
• it is essential that a copy letter and a stamped addressed envelope are enclosed

Please note that acknowledgements will not be provided if these steps are not followed.

We would also remind customers that the acknowledgement only confirms that Companies House has received document(s). These have yet to be processed and accepted or rejected.

Customers are increasingly turning to electronic submission of Annual Returns, Accounts and a range of other transactions, using our WebFiling Service. Some of the benefits of using WebFiling are:

• filing online saves you time – file directly from your PC
• there is less chance of rejections due to in built checks and pre-populated data
• you receive an automatic email acknowledgement
• documents are processed more quickly - most within 24 hours of submission
• it is significantly cheaper to file your Annual Return electronically (£14 instead of £40 on paper)

WebFiling also provides access to:

• eReminders – a FREE, convenient and effective way of knowing when your company accounts and annual returns are due to be filed.
• PROOF (PROtected Online Filing) – FREE protection for your company or LLP from hijack by preventing attempts to change your registered office address or directors without your knowledge.