Can dormant company accounts be filed automatically?

By DormantFile · Updated 10 June 2026

If your company has been dormant for years, the question is obvious: the accounts are identical every time, so why am I still doing this by hand? Can't the whole thing just happen automatically?

The short answer: everything except one click can be automated — and that last click can't be, for a legal reason worth understanding.

What can be automated

Most of the annual chore is mechanical, and software can legitimately do all of it:

• Tracking the deadline. Dormant accounts are due 9 months after your accounting reference date (21 months from incorporation for a first period longer than 12 months). Software can compute this and remind you without you lifting a finger.
• Preparing the accounts. A dormant company's balance sheet is unchanged year to year — typically just the called-up share capital. The next set can be prepared from the last set automatically.
• Submitting to Companies House. The software filing API accepts dormant accounts electronically, using your company's authentication code.
• Confirming the result. Acceptance (or rejection) comes back electronically, so you can be emailed proof — or warned — without checking anything yourself.

The one thing that can't be automated

Dormant accounts contain a statement that the company was dormant throughout the period — that it had no significant accounting transactions. That is a director's legal statement about what the company actually did, and it has to be true for each new period.

No software can know that your company stayed dormant this year. Maybe the bank paid interest. Maybe you took a payment through the company "just this once". Maybe a Bounce Back Loan repayment is quietly breaking dormancy. These things catch directors out precisely because they feel too small to count.

A fully automatic, zero-touch filing would mean a machine making your legal statement for you, on facts it cannot check. That's not a corner any honest filing service should cut.

One click a year: the legal minimum

This is why DormantFile's autopilot is built around a single annual click rather than zero. We prepare the accounts, watch the deadline, and email you 30 days before it's due. You click once to confirm the company is still dormant — that click is your director's statement — and the accounts are filed with Companies House moments later.

If the company isn't dormant any more, you don't click, and nothing is filed. The one click is the whole point: it keeps a human director answering the one question only a human director can answer.

Autopilot covers dormant accounts only. Micro-entity accounts need fresh figures every year, so we always ask for those — and your CT600 is always filed by you, with your own HMRC login, which we never store.

Key points

• The mechanical parts of dormant filing — deadline tracking, preparing the accounts, submission, proof — can all be automated.
• The dormancy statement is a director's annual legal statement; no software can truthfully make it for you.
• One-click filing is the legal minimum: the click is your confirmation that the company stayed dormant.
• Autopilot is optional and opt-in: your authentication code is stored encrypted only if you enable it, and turning it off deletes the code immediately.
• Anything that needs fresh judgment or fresh figures — micro-entity accounts, the CT600, a company that has started trading — stays in your hands.