You can appoint an Individual as a Director easily on Inform Direct and the relevant submissions are made immediately to Companies House.
1. Go to the Officers tab.
2. Click on the blue 'Appoint Officer' and choose 'Appoint an Individual as an Officer'.
Note: if you are appointing a corporate officer read the related article How do I appoint a Corporate Officer?
At this stage it does not matter whether they are going to be a director or a secretary or both. The term 'Officer' refers to either a director or a secretary.
3. Enter the date of the appointment and whether the individual is going to be a director, a secretary or both.
Note: If you enter a date before the last confirmation statement there may be a date restriction in place, see Can I Override the Date Restrictions?
4. In the next window, start typing the Forename or Surname of the person you are adding, this will check for records of existing people from your portfolio of companies. See How do I select an Existing Person?
Note: The Green icon next to the individual name indicates that it is the record from within that company. Those without a green icon relate to another company.
5. If the officer is not already known to Inform Direct select the green 'Create new person' button and enter the details requested.
If the person has used any other names for business purposes in the past 20 years, select 'Yes' and enter the previous names.
Note: The maiden names of married women only need to be included if they were used for business purposes.
Note: You must tick to confirm that the officer has consented to act. However, the Email, Telephone number and NI number are optional fields. This information is not communicated to Companies House.
6. You will then be required to provide the DoB, nationality and business occupation of the director. If Inform Direct has this information it will pre-populate the fields. If there is no specific business occupation e.g. Engineer then it is quite acceptable to put the word 'Director'.
7. Companies House require the residential address for a director. Please note that residential addresses do not appear on the public record.
You either have the option to enter a new address, this includes a postcode search for UK based addresses, or you can How do I select a Previously Entered Address?
8. If the director has applied to keep their address private from credit reference agencies then you should tick the 'Yes' box. You will already need to have applied for this from Companies House otherwise the appointment is likely to be rejected.
9. You will now be required to provide the service address used by the director. The service address is the official address of the company officer. It is the address to which government bodies such as Companies House or HMRC will send any correspondence to the officer. It's quite common for the officer's service address to be the same as the company's registered office address.
10. Before submitting the appointment to Companies House there is an opportunity to produce a summary document, this can be used to get approval before making the submission. Selecting Yes will take you through the process to create the approval document. How do I prepare draft documents to appoint an officer?
Selecting No does not create the summary document and proceeds to step 11 below.
Note: The approval document feature is only available to subscribers to the software. What are the benefits of subscribing to Inform Direct?
11. Inform Direct provides a summary of the proposed appointment. You can see the full details if you click on the 'show details' link. If you are happy that you have correctly recorded all the details click the red 'Submit appointment' button.
12. Inform Direct will then process the transaction and will electronically file the appointment request with Companies House. Appointments are normally approved within a few minutes but can take up to 48 hours.
13. If you then return to the list of all the officers you will see the name of the new director together with an orange icon marked pending. Once Companies House accept the appointment the orange icon will turn green and read 'current'.
14. Inform Direct will automatically update all the statutory registers.