Terms of Service

These terms govern your use of SimpleReturns. Please read them carefully — they explain what we do, what we don't do, what you pay, and where legal responsibility sits. If you do not accept them, do not use the service.

1. Who we are

SimpleReturns is operated by $IMPLE RETURNS LTD, a private limited company registered in England and Wales under company number 17263315 (the Company, we, us, or our). You can reach us at [email protected].

You — the person who has signed up, or the company you direct on whose behalf you are signing up — are referred to as you or the Customer. These terms form a legally binding contract between you and us.

2. What the service does

SimpleReturns helps a director of a UK private limited company that meets the FRS 105 micro-entity criteria prepare and submit, in one wizard:

• A Corporation Tax return (CT600) and the supporting computations, transmitted to HM Revenue & Customs via the HMRC Corporation Tax Online Gateway. We transmit on the director's own behalf; we do not act as the company's tax agent.
• Micro-entity statutory accounts under FRS 105 (Section 1A), transmitted to Companies House via the Companies House XML Gateway.

We are independent software. We are not HMRC, we are not Companies House, and we are not a firm of chartered or certified accountants. We hold no practising certificate and we do not provide regulated tax advice. Where the service offers explanations or suggestions, those are educational only.

3. What the service does not do

SimpleReturns is currently scoped to FRS 105 micro-entity filings only. The service does not currently support:

• VAT returns, PAYE returns, or any payroll filings.
• Self-Assessment for directors or other individuals.
• Companies that do not qualify as a micro-entity (for example, those with turnover above £632,000, balance sheet total above £316,000, or more than 10 employees on average — see s.384A Companies Act 2006).
• FRS 102, full IFRS, or group accounts.
• Filing for charities, LLPs, partnerships, overseas entities, or unincorporated businesses.
• Long accounting periods that exceed twelve months (HMRC requires these to be split into two returns; we surface the split but do not yet automate it).

If your circumstances fall outside the supported scope you must not use SimpleReturns for that filing. If you are unsure, ask us at [email protected] before submitting.

4. Your responsibilities as a director

Under the Companies Act 2006 and the Corporation Tax Act 2010, the director of a UK limited company is personally and legally responsible for the truth and completeness of the company's statutory accounts and tax return. That responsibility stays with you.

SimpleReturns automates the mechanics of preparing and transmitting your filing. You are responsible for:

• Providing complete, accurate and current information about the company and its trading activity.
• Using your own real, full name on your account, and only filing for companies where you are an authorised director or officer. We may show a warning when the name on your account does not match a director on record at Companies House; that warning is a courtesy, and ensuring you are authorised to file remains your responsibility.
• Reviewing every figure shown by the service before you press Submit, including any categorisation suggested by our AI features.
• Confirming that the directors' declaration on the sign-off step is true to the best of your knowledge.
• Meeting your statutory filing deadlines. Our software does not guarantee a deadline will be met if you start the process late or if HMRC or Companies House experience outages.

By ticking the directors' declaration on the sign-off step you confirm that you are an appointed director of the company in question, that the figures and disclosures in the return are true and complete to the best of your knowledge, and that you authorise us to transmit the filing on the company's behalf.

SimpleReturns is a self-service product. We provide the tools to prepare and transmit your filing; the figures, declarations and identity details you enter are yours and remain your responsibility. We are not an enforcement agency and do not independently verify your identity or your authority to file beyond the checks described above. Any misuse of the service, and any false or misleading information provided through it, is the responsibility of the user, not SimpleReturns.

5. AI features can make mistakes

SimpleReturns uses third-party large-language models throughout the service to save you time. Examples include: categorising individual bank-statement lines into FRS 105 line items, explaining tax rules in plain English, drafting the notes that accompany your accounts, and flagging unusual figures for your review. These features are advisory only and can be wrong. Large-language models are known to make factual errors, miscategorise edge cases, and occasionally hallucinate.

Nothing the AI shows you is regulated tax advice, and we make no warranty that any AI-generated output matches the position your accountant or HMRC would take. You must read, sense-check and confirm every figure in the return before you press Submit. Once you press Submit, the figures are deemed to be your figures and the director's declaration is your declaration, irrespective of how the wizard arrived at them.

The in-app help assistant is one of these AI features. It answers questions about how to use the service from a curated library of our own guidance and quoted official HMRC / Companies House material — it is help with using the app, not regulated tax advice, and it can be wrong. To improve it we store the questions you ask; please do not enter personal or sensitive details (see our Privacy Policy).

6. Account, authentication and security

We authenticate you via a magic-link email sent to the address on your account, and we hold an in-session JSON Web Token to keep you signed in. The Companies House Authentication Code you provide at company binding is held in our UK Postgres database under restricted application-level access and is used only to transmit returns on the named company's behalf.

You are responsible for keeping your email inbox secure and for keeping your Companies House Authentication Code confidential. Do not share your account login or your authentication code with anyone outside the board of directors of the company concerned. Notify us immediately at [email protected] if you suspect a compromise.

You can change the name on your account at any time from Settings, and you can delete your account. When you delete your account we permanently remove your personal details and your ability to sign in, and we delete your HMRC connection. We keep the returns you have already filed, their supporting records and the filing trail for six years because the law requires it (see our Privacy Policy). To maintain an accurate record, we retain a history of the changes you make to the name and email address on your account.

7. Fees and payment

SimpleReturns charges a flat £99 per submission, paid via our payment processor Stripe at the point of filing. There is no subscription, no monthly fee and no charge for creating an account or starting a return that you do not submit. The £99 is the total price; we are not VAT-registered, so no VAT is added.

Pricing may change. If we change our fees, the change applies to filings you start after the change. A filing you have already paid for is locked at the price you paid.

8. What happens if HMRC or Companies House rejects a filing

HMRC and Companies House each operate their own validation and may reject a filing for reasons including but not limited to: incorrect authentication code, accounts that fail a Companies House schema check, or a Corporation Tax return that fails an HMRC business rule.

When this happens, we will surface the regulator's response message, and you may correct the figures and re-submit at no additional charge, provided the original submission was made within twelve months of the rejection. There is no per-attempt fee: the £99 covers all attempts to file the same accounting period until one is accepted, subject to the twelve-month limit.

If the rejection is caused by data or circumstances outside the supported scope of the service (see section 3), we will refund the £99 fee. This refund is your sole and exclusive remedy for an out-of-scope rejection; the liability cap in section 15 continues to apply on top. We will not refund where the rejection results from incorrect information you provided, including but not limited to: figures that do not match the underlying records, an out-of-date Companies House code, or an incorrect Unique Taxpayer Reference.

9. Amendments

Within twenty-four months of an HMRC-accepted Corporation Tax return for the same accounting period, you may open an Amendment from the dashboard at no additional charge. After twenty-four months the HMRC amendment window closes and any correction to the tax return must be made directly with HMRC. This twenty-four-month limit applies to the CT600 only.

Companies House does not impose an equivalent fixed window for micro-entity account amendments, but does have its own rules on replacement accounts (currently under the Companies (Revision of Defective Accounts and Reports) Regulations 2008). Where you ask us to re-file accounts only, we will accept the amendment regardless of how long ago the original was filed. Amendments replace the prior submission; the original record stays on file with both regulators.

10. Service availability

We aim to keep SimpleReturns available at all times but do not guarantee uninterrupted access. We may suspend the service for scheduled maintenance or for emergency repairs. The Companies House and HMRC Gateways have their own published downtime; filings cannot be transmitted during those windows. We have no control over either regulator's availability and do not accept responsibility for deadlines missed due to regulator outages.

11. Your data and our use of it

Our processing of personal data is governed by our Privacy Policy, which forms part of these terms. In summary: we collect only the data needed to prepare and transmit your filings; we store it on UK or EU infrastructure; we do not sell it; and we retain it for the period required by HMRC and Companies House record-keeping rules (currently six years from the end of the accounting period to which it relates).

We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). We are the data controller for the personal data we hold about you (your account, login and billing details), as set out in our Privacy Policy. You remain responsible for the accuracy of the company financial figures you submit.

12. Intellectual property

The SimpleReturns name, logo, software, wizard flow, AI prompts, brand assets and underlying source code are owned by us and are protected by UK and international copyright and trade-mark law. You receive a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use the service for the purpose of preparing and filing your own company's returns. You must not reverse-engineer, scrape, resell or rebrand the service, and you must not use it to file for a company you are not a director of without that company's written authority.

13. Acceptable use

You must not:

• Submit information that you know or suspect is false or misleading.
• Use the service to commit, or to assist anyone in committing, an offence under the Companies Act 2006, the Corporation Tax Act 2010, the Fraud Act 2006, the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, or any other applicable law.
• Attempt to interfere with the operation of the service, including by introducing malware, attempting to overwhelm our infrastructure, or probing for security vulnerabilities without our written authorisation.
• Use automated scripts to scrape the service or any output it produces.

14. Termination

You may stop using the service at any time. We may suspend or terminate your account if you breach these terms, if we are required to do so by law, or if we reasonably believe that allowing continued use would expose us, you or HMRC to risk. Where we terminate without cause we will refund any fees you have paid for filings not yet submitted. Termination does not affect rights or obligations that arose before it.

15. Limitation of liability

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for:

• death or personal injury caused by our negligence;
• fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation; or
• any other liability that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded.

Subject to that, and to the maximum extent permitted by law, our total liability to you for any and all claims arising out of or in connection with your use of the service in any 12-month period is capped at the fees you actually paid us in that period. We are not liable for:

• HMRC penalties, interest, surcharges or other consequences arising from figures, declarations or omissions you submitted, even if our software did not warn you about them;
• missed statutory filing deadlines, including where the missing of the deadline is a result of you starting the process too late or of a regulator outage;
• data loss arising from your failure to keep your own back-ups of source records (bank statements, invoices, payroll exports);
• indirect, consequential, or special losses; or loss of profit, revenue, business opportunity, or goodwill.

You are responsible for keeping copies of every submission we transmit on your behalf — they are available to download from your dashboard for the six-year retention period referenced in section 11.

16. Indemnity

You agree to indemnify us against any loss, claim, fine or expense (including reasonable legal fees) suffered by us as a result of: (a) any deliberately or recklessly inaccurate information you submitted through the service; (b) your use of the service in breach of these terms; or (c) your use of the service to file on behalf of a company for which you are not a duly appointed director with the authority to sign and file.

17. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms from time to time. We will post the updated version on this page with a new "last updated" date, and where the change is material we will email you in advance. Continued use of the service after the change takes effect is acceptance of the new terms. If you do not accept a change, stop using the service before its effective date.

18. Governing law and jurisdiction

These terms and any dispute arising from them or your use of the service are governed by the law of England and Wales. The courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction to settle any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with these terms or their subject matter or formation.

19. Notices and contact

Any notice to us under these terms should be sent to [email protected]. We will send notices to you at the email address on your account.

20. Entire agreement and severability

These terms, together with our Privacy Policy, constitute the entire agreement between you and us in respect of the service and supersede any previous understanding, oral or written. If any provision is held unenforceable, the remaining provisions continue in full force.