Outsourced company secretary services, on retainer.

Outsourced company secretary services keep a company's statutory records correct and its registry filings on time. That covers the register of members, the register of directors and the register of persons with significant control, the annual Confirmation Statement, share allotments and transfers, board minutes, written resolutions and AGM administration.

Company secretarial work is the unglamorous backbone of corporate governance. Keep the statutory registers current. File the Confirmation Statement on time. Document share issues correctly. Draft board minutes and shareholder resolutions. Update the PSC register when ownership shifts. It rarely makes headlines, but missed filings carry penalties, and poorly-documented corporate actions create real legal exposure during due diligence.

For UK Ltds, LLPs and CICs we provide a complete outsourced company secretarial function. We maintain your registers, file your Confirmation Statement, draft minutes for board meetings, document share allotments and transfers, update the PSC register, and handle the administrative side of AGMs.

For US, UAE, Canadian and Australian entities, the equivalent role exists with different mechanics: registered agent services, share-register maintenance, annual returns to ASIC, freezone-specific reporting. We coordinate the local agent and handle the substantive documentation.

For VC-backed companies and growth-stage businesses, well-kept corporate records reduce due-diligence friction enormously. Buyers and investors expect clean statutory books, and finding a mess in DD damages valuation. We keep yours pristine, year after year.

The filing calendar for a UK limited company is short and unforgiving. A Confirmation Statement must be delivered at least once every 12 months, within 14 days of the end of the review period, even in a year where nothing changed. Statutory accounts are due at Companies House nine months after the accounting reference date, with a longer window for a first set. Late accounts penalties start at £150 and reach £1,500 once you are more than six months past, and they double if the previous year was also late.

Registers are the part that gets neglected, and the part that hurts later. Under the Companies Act 2006 the company itself, not the registry, is the keeper of its register of members. A change to the persons with significant control has to be entered in the register within 14 days and notified to Companies House within a further 14. Missing a Confirmation Statement is an offence for the directors and can put the company on the strike-off list, which in practice means a frozen bank account before anyone reads the letter.

What goes wrong, in order. A founder issues shares to an adviser by sending an email and a spreadsheet. No board minute, no SH01 within a month, no entry in the register of members. Two years later a lead investor asks for the cap table and the statutory books, the two do not agree, and the fix is a rectification exercise plus a warranty disclosure at exactly the moment you have least leverage. For VC-backed startups this is among the most common diligence findings, and it is entirely preventable at the point the share is issued.

A worked example of one year of retainer scope for a seed-stage UK company: one Confirmation Statement, four board meetings minuted, two share allotments with the associated SH01 filings, one option grant round entered on the register, one director appointment and one registered office change. That is roughly a dozen dated documents, each of which is either in the statutory books or is a problem waiting to be found.

The work sits naturally alongside company incorporation at the start and audit and due-diligence preparation later. UK-specific compliance detail, including the HMRC side, is on the UK accounting services page, and firms in regulated sectors such as law practices carry a second layer of record keeping on top. Retainer fees are listed on the fixed-fee pricing page, and the scope is defined in our standard engagement terms. Secretarial work is rarely bought alone, and the services it usually runs alongside are listed in our list of accounting and bookkeeping services.