Preparation checklist: Greater integration between Glide and Companies House is around the corner

For years, Glide has accessed accurate information from Companies House when creating new clients on your Glide systems. This has brought greater simplicity when adding new clients, either in bulk or incrementally thereafter, and more accuracy.

Very soon, we shall be taking this integration to the next level with the introduction of ongoing monitoring. The additional benefits are explained below. In summary, Glide will now become aware of changes to the record at Companies House and will instantly compare this to the data in your Glide system. Where discrepancies are detected, these will either be corrected automatically or flagged as an issue for you to investigate.

The benefit will be even greater reliability over the data on your Glide system. There will be less need to fear the client who changes their year end and doesn’t let you know!!

We plan to fully release the feature by the turn of the year, sooner for those interested in beta testing, but write this blog post now to advise of some data cleansing recommendations we are making in advance of this change.

If you intend to use this feature (if you don’t, it can easily be deactivated), please consider reviewing the Company number data point over the course of the next month and a half for these possible issues:

• Check that a company number is present for all clients that exist on the register.
• Check that they are correct.
• Check that only UK company numbers exist in this field. Inclusion of a foreign register number could cause confusion if it were to also exist on the UK register, as it would be for the wrong entity. (Using the query editor to see where the ‘Country’ isn’t the UK could help here).
• Watch out for Charity registration numbers creeping in.

We also recommend taking the opportunity to ensure the Accounts workflow is set to ‘Inactive’ on clients that do not receive the Accounts workflow. This will minimise the number of issues you may need to review when the integration is launched, at which point it will compare all your clients to Companies House data.

At first, the new integration will monitor the following data points that you’ll be familiar with from the Companies House ‘Find company information’ service.

• Next accounts made up to – this will be checked against your trigger dates and job dates for any number of Annual wokflow systems. This is likely to be the main Accounts and Corporation tax flow(s) and any separate audit flows too. It would also be applicable for any other processes you run based upon the year end, such as a separate ‘pre year end’ tax planning flow. Discrepancies here will be flagged for you to change.
• Due by – where the job date on Glide agrees to the above, or is within 7 days, we shall check the deadline and correct it where it is wrong on Glide. This may currently happen where you negotiate a filing extension as you currently have to update the deadline manually on Glide.
• Last accounts made up to – this will principally allow Glide to advise you that a set of Accounts have been filed, for example, where they may remain live on Glide. It also helps Glide to interpret your live jobs to confirm the validity of them, for example, you would not expect to see a live job with a date equal to or earlier than this.
• Next [Confirmation] statement date – this is essentially ‘as per’ the ‘Next accounts made up to’ data point except we are checking the Confirmation Statement trigger date and job dates.
• Due by – again, where the Confirmation Statement dates agree, we shall ensure the deadlines are kept in sync.

So, at first, this is largely about bringing even more certainty to dates. In the future, we also plan to expand the functionality to further leverage the event based data that can streamed from Companies House. Examples may well include the ability to automatically progress a job where filing is detected and the ability to automatically trigger a workflow where a change in client status is detected. The opportunities seem extensive and we look forward to using them to further boost the value Glide can bring to your practice.

As ever, if you have any queries about this upcoming change, please do not hesitate to contact the team via the usual channels.