Wow, I'd somehow missed these changes coming in for UK companies, including a requirement to file accounts using software (which will probably mean proprietary software, as I can't see how open source projects could get access). Although if it's anything like Making Tax Digital from HMRC, it will be delivered incomplete and late.
https://changestoukcompanylaw.campaign.gov.uk/changes-to-accounts/
I don't have an issue with requiring software filing as such, but I don't get why Web Filing (which is software!) is going away. If government bodies want to mandate software filing then they need to either provide a free web option that they host (and can therefore guarantee works etc.) or make their APIs open.
As far as I can tell, if I were to write an open source desktop application for filing data, every user of that app would have to register it separately, including going through the testing and authorisation process, which I suspect would put off your average user. I can’t see any way around this (I would like to be wrong as I am very pro open source for lots of reasons, including having a diverse ecosystem).
@pwaring is that true if they just officially released binaries?
@kinnison Hmm, I guess if you built binaries with the client secret embedded (but not trivially extractable) you could possibly get away with that. The builds wouldn't be reproducible but the average user probably doesn't care about that.
