Compliance Calendar Management: Four Deadline Streams Per Client, None of Them Aligned

Every client generates at least four separate deadline streams running simultaneously: corporation tax, VAT, payroll RTI, and Companies House filings. None of them align with each other. None of them align with the accounting year-end. And each one carries its own penalty regime if missed.

The alignment problem

A company with a 31 March year-end has accounts due at Companies House by 31 December, CT600 due by 31 March the following year, a confirmation statement due on a date based on its incorporation date which could be any day of the year, and VAT quarters that are entirely independent of the year-end and could fall in any month. Four streams. Four different deadlines. None overlapping.

Multiply this across 50 or 60 clients and you have a compliance calendar that cannot be managed reliably from a spreadsheet or a fee earner's memory.

Each client has its own unique combination of year-end dates, VAT registration dates, payroll frequencies, and incorporation dates. The permutations don't repeat. Every client is its own calendar.

The HMRC authorisation gap

Before a firm can act on a client's behalf for any HMRC matter, a 64-8 authorisation must be filed and confirmed as processed. Firms often start work before the 64-8 is confirmed, creating a period where the firm is technically unauthorised to act. If a deadline falls during that window, the firm can't file.

VAT is a separate authorisation. The 64-8 alone doesn't cover online VAT submissions. That requires its own digital authorisation through the client's business tax account. Practices that assume the 64-8 covers everything find out otherwise when a VAT deadline arrives and the system won't accept the submission.

Payroll RTI

Full Payment Submissions must be filed on or before each pay date, not monthly, not after the fact. One missed RTI creates a penalty and a messy reconciliation. For clients with weekly payroll, this is a weekly deadline. For clients with multiple pay runs at different frequencies, it's a continuous calendar management task.

What we do

We build and maintain per-client deadline trackers across all four streams, send internal alerts to fee earners ahead of each deadline, track 64-8 authorisation status per client and per tax head, and flag where authorisation is missing before it becomes urgent. The professional judgement on each filing stays with you. The tracking and alerting stays with us.