Guidance on Companies House (CH) rendering

Companies House system requires Inline XBRL (iXBRL) accounts format for electronic submissions and this is a format not intended to be used for representational purposes directly.

This is converted to PDF by the Companies House gateway upon submission, and this is what is shown on the CH website.

For this reason, the PDF that is generated in the accounts may not be identical to the one shown on the CH website.

Follow the guidance below to limit affecting CH rendering when preparing accounts:

• Avoid inserting large images into the accounts.
• Inserting objects like Excel tables/images can cause rendering problems as the aspect ratios can change during both the Caseware generation and CH rendering stages.
• Manually adjusting column widths to excess in tables as this has been known to cause issues with rendering.
• When adding manual content, specifically large text sections from other text editors such as Word. Try where possible to paste this without formation and then use the options built into CaseView to reformat the content. Using the CaseView options for this will help with rendering and ensure that special characters etc. are not brought into the file.
• We recommend to all users that they take advantage of the Show image option provided by Companies House on their test service. https://test-validator.companieshouse.gov.uk/xbrl_validate/submit