Registered office and company secretarial

Every UK company must have a registered office in the UK where official documents can be served, and since March 2024 the rules say it must be an address where a document will come to the attention of someone acting for the company. HMRC, Companies House, the courts and anyone suing the company write to that address. For a subsidiary whose management is abroad, the practical answer is an accountant's office with someone whose job is to open the post.

The address

• Our office is the company's registered office. It appears on the public register, on the company's letterhead, website and invoices, as the law requires.
• Directors and controllers can use it as their service address too, so their home addresses abroad stay off the public register.
• Everything that arrives is opened, scanned and emailed to you the same working day. Tax references, penalty warnings and court papers do not sit in a pile for a fortnight.
• HMRC's tax references and Companies House's authentication code are held on your file, so nothing is lost when someone leaves the parent.

The registers and filings

A company secretary is no longer compulsory for a private company, but the work a company secretary did still has to be done, and what that work is changed on 18 November 2025. Companies no longer keep their own registers of directors, directors' residential addresses, secretaries or people with significant control. That information is now filed at Companies House and kept up to date there. The company must still keep its own register of members, and that one is easy to forget precisely because the others went away.

The confirmation statement, due within fourteen days of the end of each review period and costing £50, confirms the record is right. Changes of director, changes of address, share allotments and changes in control each have their own form and their own deadline. Missing one is a fine at best, and an inaccurate ownership record is a criminal offence.

We keep the register of members, file every change at Companies House, and diarise the confirmation statement so the company never goes overdue. Companies House now has the power to change a company's registered office itself, or to strike the company off, where the rules are not met, so an unattended record is a live risk rather than an untidy one.

Board minutes and dividends

A UK subsidiary needs written decisions for the things a UK company must decide formally: approving the accounts, declaring a dividend to the parent, appointing directors, opening a bank account, entering an intercompany agreement. A dividend paid without the right paperwork, or paid when the company had no distributable profits, can be reclaimed from the parent. We prepare the minutes and the dividend vouchers, and we check the distributable reserves before any dividend goes up to the parent.

Keeping the public record clean

The public record at Companies House is what UK customers, suppliers and banks look at before they deal with you. Accounts filed on time, a current confirmation statement and a proper registered office are what they expect to see. We monitor the record and correct anything that drifts.