Look up a small British company on the public register and you will usually find a balance sheet, a handful of notes, and nothing else — no profit and loss account, no turnover, no directors' report. Those are filleted accounts: the legal minimum a small company has to make public, while its members receive the full version. It is the most widely used disclosure concession in UK company law, and it is on its way out.
What filleting actually is
A small company prepares one set of accounts for its members and may file a reduced version at Companies House. Section 444 of the Companies Act 2006 allows the directors to leave out the profit and loss account and the directors' report from what is delivered to the registrar — the "filleting" — and to file a balance sheet with only the notes required for the small companies regime.
Two points are routinely confused. First, filleting is about filing, not preparation: the members still receive full accounts including the profit and loss account, and the company still prepares them. Second, filleted is not the same as abridged. Abridgement is a different concession, requiring the unanimous consent of members each year, which permits a less detailed balance sheet and profit and loss account to be prepared. A company can abridge, fillet, both, or neither; most simply fillet.
Where the accounts are filleted, the balance sheet must carry a statement that they were delivered under the small companies regime, and the audit exemption statement where the company is unaudited. Micro-entities have their own, still narrower regime under section 444A, with a much reduced balance sheet and a handful of notes.
Who qualifies
The small companies regime applies where a company meets two of three conditions, and those limits rose substantially for financial years beginning on or after 6 April 2025: turnover not more than £15 million, balance sheet total not more than £7.5 million, and not more than 50 employees. The usual two-year rule applies, and a parent company must test the group as a whole.
The exclusions are absolute regardless of size — public companies, and companies in an ineligible group containing a public company, a bank, an insurer or a regulated financial firm. A company that qualifies as small for accounts purposes may still need an audit for other reasons, and being audited does not prevent filleting — but the report is not simply withheld. Where an audited small company leaves the profit and loss account out of the filed version, the notes to the filed balance sheet must state whether the auditor's report was qualified or unqualified, give the basis of any qualification, refer to any matter the auditor emphasised, and name the auditor and the senior statutory auditor. A company that has taken audit exemption instead gives the statutory exemption statement on the balance sheet, and micro-entities are outside this requirement.
What it buys, and what it costs
The benefit is straightforward commercial confidentiality. A competitor, a customer or a supplier cannot read your turnover, your margin or your directors' remuneration from the public record. For owner-managed businesses bidding against larger rivals, or for firms whose pricing would be obvious from a gross margin, that matters.
The cost is credibility, and it is underrated. Credit reference agencies score what they can see; a balance sheet with no profit information gives their models less to work with, and the score frequently suffers for it. Lenders, large customers running supplier due diligence and prospective buyers all ask for the full accounts anyway — and a company that has filleted has to hand them over privately, which is fine, but slower. Businesses actively seeking finance or a sale sometimes choose to file in full precisely to avoid that friction.
The change that ends it
The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act removes the option. Under the reforms, small companies and micro-entities will have to file a profit and loss account, and small companies that are not micro-entities will also file a directors' report — which between them abolish filleting in substance. Companies House has been clear that the underlying aim is to make the register more reliable, alongside the identity verification and lawful purpose requirements introduced by the same Act.
The timetable has moved more than once, and on the current one the accounts changes take effect from 1 April 2028. Abridged accounts go, and the filleting option with them: small and micro companies will have to file a profit and loss account like everyone else. But separate filing from publication, because the two are not the same thing and most commentary runs them together. Small and micro companies are to be given the option to opt out of having the filed profit and loss account published on the public register. The mechanism has not been announced, so nobody can yet say how the opt-out will be claimed or what it will require — only that one is promised.
That makes the planning question narrower than it looked. Businesses that have relied on non-disclosure of turnover and margin should still be deciding how those figures read, because they will be filed and Companies House will hold them; what remains open is whether a competitor can pull them off the register. Anyone briefing on the basis that turnover becomes public in 2028 regardless is overstating the position — as is anyone assuming the opt-out makes the change irrelevant.
What to do with the notice period
Three practical steps. Check whether you are relying on filleting for a genuine commercial reason or simply because it is what your accountant has always done — a surprising number of companies fillet by default with nothing sensitive to protect. Where the reason is real, model what a published profit and loss account would show for the last three years and decide whether anything about how the business is presented needs to change before it is on the record. And keep the filing discipline itself intact: filleted or not, late accounts carry automatic penalties that double for a second consecutive late year, which is a far more immediate risk than the disclosure debate.
Acumon prepares and files statutory accounts, abridged and filleted accounts and micro-entity accounts, and advises on where the small companies regime ends — including the audit exemption thresholds that moved at the same time. If the confidentiality of your numbers is commercially important, the time to plan for publication is before the rules make the decision for you.