I built a tool to read my Companies House deadlines
The Companies House reminder emails never tell you the date. So I made something that does, and warns me before it matters.
I run a UK limited company, and Companies House emails me on a schedule. A confirmation statement is coming up. Accounts are due. There is now a director identity verification step as well. The emails are good at telling me that something needs doing. They are not good at telling me when.
So a while back I did the obvious thing and logged into the portal to check. Nothing was actually overdue, and the nearest deadline was still comfortably far off. But I did not just want a yes or no on whether anything was late. I wanted to look ahead: which deadlines are coming, how much time I have, and what I should start preparing. Getting that meant logging in, finding the company, and reading dates off a few different pages.
That is a small annoyance, but it is the kind you repeat forever and never fix. So I built the smallest thing that fixes it.
Phase 1: just show me the dates
Compliance Copilot does one job. You give it a company number and it reads the public record from the Companies House API, then shows the statutory deadlines with the days left on each: confirmation statement, accounts, and identity verification. It marks anything overdue or due soon. No login, no clicking through the portal.
If you want, you can also hand it an email address and let it watch a company for you. After one confirmation click it sends a reminder at 60, 30, 7 and 0 days before a deadline, and once more on the first day something goes overdue. That is the whole schedule. I wanted enough warning to act on, not another app pinging me every morning.
One rule shaped the rest of it: it only reads. It never files anything and it never asks for write access. Everything it shows is already public, and the point of this phase is planning, not doing. Staying read-only also meant I could put it online without worrying about it doing something irreversible on my behalf.
Why keep it this small
I could have aimed bigger on day one. I chose not to. The real open question here is about adoption, not code: does the low-level deadline anxiety I feel actually bother other UK company owners enough to change how they keep track? The cheapest way to find out is to use it myself, on my own company, against real dates, and watch where it genuinely helps. So phase 1 is small on purpose.
What might come next
The Companies House deadlines are the easy, low risk half of running a company. The harder half is tax: HMRC, Making Tax Digital, the VAT and corporation tax dates, and eventually the preparation behind a filing rather than just the date of it. That is where I would like this to go.
It is also where the stakes jump. Anything that touches an HMRC submission or a filing is no longer read-only, and a mistake there can cost real money. So that part stays parked. I want this first version to earn its place by being genuinely useful for the boring lookup before I let it anywhere near the part that bites back.
For now it is one company number, a few dates, and an email that turns up before I would otherwise have remembered to look.
Try it: biz-copilot.simonyau.me. For what it is and how it is built, see the project page.