What is companies house?

March 4th, 2010 by chris

If you need to boost the status of your business, you may need to go through an official Government body in order to make this happen. In England, Wales and Scotland, the name of this body is Companies House – an independent body which was established by the Department for Business, Skills and Innovation. In this article, we are going to explore what Companies House is, and what it can do for your business.

The Companies House website is the hub for all of the information which can concern the different processes that you might have to go through during your business’ lifespan. Additionally, you can also download the forms that you might require to fill in from the Internet in some circumstances. In others, you could also proceed to fill out the customary fields online – this quickens the time it takes to process your request, even allowing you to omit registration fees in some examples.

There are a number of key objectives that Companies House undertakes on behalf of the British Government. One of the main aims is to act as a database of all of the companies which are active in the UK, and this is why it is a legal requirement to declare a new company through this body first. Companies House has to do this as a result of the Companies Act 2006, which includes the remit to examine the details of all businesses to ensure that trade is being conducted fairly.

As well as helping with the stages of establishing a company, the regulator can also help when a business is being concluded. This means that the body can help with winding up any of the assets which may remain once a company has dissolved, ensuring that everything is distributed and handled with appropriately.

Some members of the public can require to gain some information about a particular company from time to time, and one of the aims of Companies House is for the information that they have concerning a particular business to be readily available in the public domain.

This organisation is the latest reincarnation of systems from the UK which have been active for 160 years, all endeavouring to comprehensively register companies which may be operating within the country.

A company incorporation is normally a process which can take anything up to 10 days. This is because all the forms that are concerned with the company need to be digested, as well as the Articles of Association and the Memorandum of Association, which form up the Constitution.

If you don’t believe that you can wait all that time, there is also a service where your company can be registered fully in one day, on the condition that all of the relevant information is received before 3pm on the day. There is usually a significant premium of £30 added to the usual cost of £20 that is incurred for company registration. Companies House is one of the most important bodies that a person can deal with; knowing its functionality fully can prevent disappointment.