Closing down your company

f your company ceases to trade, you need to make a decision as to whether you are going to have the company struck off. You can also make your company dormant and we'll cover this at a later date. However, in the meantime this article provides details of what steps you need to take when closing down your company.

Striking your company off means it will be removed from the register at Companies House and will no longer exist. If you decide to trade again at a future date after closing down your company, you will need to register a new company. However your old company name might not still be available.

Closing down your company - prerequisites

You can get your company struck off if:

Strictly speaking, if your company doesn’t meet any of these criteria, then closing down your company is less straight-forward. In this instance, you will need to ‘liquidate’ your company.

Pre-strike off steps

The practical steps you will need to take when closing down your company and  before any final accounts are prepared are as follows:

It may be more practical to extend the company’s year end so that you only have to file one final set of accounts. This may enable you to start the strike off process more quickly.

You can see more about changing your company year end in our previous post here.

You'll need to include a note in the accounts that the company has ceased trading and there is an application for the company to be struck off.

The strike off process

Once the company’s accounts have been filed with Companies House, and the corporation tax return has been filed and any tax paid, you can start the strike off procedure. You don’t have to file final accounts with Companies House although we generally suggest that this is done unless there is a compelling reason for not doing so.

If, after submitting the DS01, you decide that you would prefer the company to be made dormant rather than being struck off, you will need to submit form DS02. This can be done online - see here.

Once the company has been struck off, you can no longer restore the company although you may be able to register a new company with the same name. 

For more useful information, check out our Ebooks here.

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