Company House Penalties, please be exact!

Phil Poorly

Hi There everyone
Happy New Year to you all
Has anyone else suffered a seemingly change in policy from Companies House?
We recently filed a set of accounts for a company with 'and' in it's title but used an '&' instead of 'and' (as we have done for 15 years and as our predecessors did for at least the year before we submitted our first set).
Companies House rejected the accounts on the basis that they were not submitted 'exactly' as the company had been registered in 1982. When we queried it with CH, they advised us that accounts should also show full stops after initials otherwise they could also be rejected, whilst 'ltd' was still acceptable as a substitute for 'limited' but that that too may also become unacceptable in the future.
Unfortunately we only filed electronically five days before the deadline and by the time CH rejected the accounts the deadline had passed and our client has received a £150 late filing penalty (which we will pay if our appeal fails as ultimately we are responsible).
Just wondered if anyone else out there has experienced anything similar.
In any case I post this as a suggestion to everyone to check your limited company names to ensure that you are filing them exactly as they were registered (We checked and found another couple not 'perfect').
Any replies will be of interest, thanks

Phil Poorly

Just to clarify...
the 'they advised us that accounts should also show full stops after initials otherwise they could also be rejected' bit,
this is only if that is the company was registered with full stops in the first place. Sorry, hope I haven't caused panic throughout the accountancy offices of the land.

burg

We have filing to CH available via our software, Keytime and this sends back error reports. We have found one client who has a ` after the name. If however we use a ' it will not be accepted.

So from our experience it does make a difference.