Group of Limited Companies

It really depends how you have set them up. These companies are already a "group" by virtue of your presumed common control, ie if you own the majority shareholding in them all. A "traditional" structure would see a holding company [H] which then owns the shares in the other companies [A] & [B] So you would hold all the shares in H, and H would hold all the shares in A and B. This allows some flexibility in terms of moving funds around between the companies, and is a true group. The real question I have is, “is this sort of structure efficient for you?” Assuming you are a small biz your accounting bills and administration is going to be quite significant with three of them on the go, and there are generally no tax advantages in having three companies unless one of them isn’t a trading company. (ie property investment etc) Another route would be to have one company with three divisions, removing a lot of the additional paperwork required to run 3 co.s There are some good reasons to set up in the manner in which you describe, but it is unusual for anything other than a large business to do so as the extra paperwork is a burden for a small co. I would suggest you sit down with your accountant and plan out where to go from here, there are quite a number of options. If you don’t have an accountant I offer an initial free ‘phone consultation within which we could look at this topic in some more detail. Regards,
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James Smith
Chartered Accountant
www.jamesesmith.co.uk
01235 536 773

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Hi Grant, I completely agree with James here. The current company I work for is a fairly small company (< 10 full time staff) but does operate in various distinct industries. Instead of having multiple limited companies for each area though what we have is different trading names under the one limited company. It gives you the benefit of being able to brand differently but still only have the one set of company returns to handle (Eg: DIVISION NAME - A Division of Able IT Ltd). Dan
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