Micro or small? Working out which accounts you need to file
The thresholds are simple once you see them side by side — and they decide whether you file under FRS 105 or FRS 102.
"AI-assisted" is doing a lot of work in accountancy marketing at the moment, and it is rarely explained. So here is the honest version of what happens between you uploading a spreadsheet and us submitting your return.
Step one: reading what you sent
Whatever format your figures arrive in — a bookkeeping export, a spreadsheet, or a stack of bank statements — the first job is turning it into a consistent set of transactions. This is where automation earns its keep. It is repetitive, rule-based work, and software does it faster and more consistently than a person working through rows by hand.
What gets automated here
- Extracting transactions and normalising dates, references and amounts
- Suggesting a category for each line based on description and history
- Reconciling totals against opening and closing balances
- Flagging gaps — missing periods, duplicates, entries that don't balance
Step two: the accountant's review
This is the part that doesn't get automated, and it's deliberate. A qualified accountant goes through the draft and makes the decisions that carry actual consequence: whether an expense is allowable, how an asset should be treated, which reliefs apply, whether something needs a conversation with you before it goes anywhere near a return.
Software is very good at answering "does this add up?" It is not the right thing to trust with "should this be here at all?"
The categorisation suggestions from step one are exactly that — suggestions. Anything the system was unsure about is surfaced for review rather than quietly guessed, which is why our drafts come back with questions attached instead of silent assumptions baked in.
Step three: your review
You get the draft accounts and CT600 with a plain-English breakdown of how the figures were arrived at. Nothing is submitted until you've read it and approved it. If something looks wrong to you, that's a conversation, not a change request — often you know something about a transaction that no amount of processing could infer.
Step four: submission
Once approved, your statutory accounts are tagged in iXBRL and filed with Companies House, and your CT600 goes to HMRC with its full computations. You get confirmation of both, and the filed documents stay available to download from your account.
Why we draw the line where we do
A statutory filing is a legal document with your name against it. The value of automation is that it removes the hours of mechanical work that used to make that document expensive — not that it removes the professional judgement that makes it correct.
That's the whole idea behind "amplified": the accountant is still doing the accounting. They're just not spending three days on data entry first.