Micro, small or medium-sized: what must you publish?

Anyone preparing annual accounts sooner or later runs into the size class. That class determines how much you must include and publish, and therefore also how much work it is. Below is how that works — without you having to go through the legal text first.

What the class determines

What exactly you file with KVK is set out at what you file with KVK.

The division into micro, small and medium-sized is an ascending series: the bigger the company, the more the annual accounts must contain and the more becomes public. A smaller class therefore means a lighter publication duty — not a lighter obligation to keep your records in order.

KVK summarises it in one place: which size class does your company fall into. There you also see what must be filed per class. The components that always come back are in what the annual accounts consist of.

What it comes down to

The class follows from key figures of your business, such as total assets, net turnover and the number of people employed — and from whether you have subsidiaries. They are not amounts you choose yourself; they follow from your figures. Because the thresholds are set in law and change over time, it is sensible to check them at the moment of filing instead of doing it from memory.

What you notice of it when preparing

• •The smaller the class, the briefer the notes may be.
• •The abridged balance sheet that many micro and small companies file is a summary — your own records are more complete.
• •The class also determines whether a management report is included.
• •You do not have to report your class separately: the documents you submit belong to one class, and that is what KVK checks.

What you control yourself

The figures from which your class follows come from the records you keep all year. Anyone who closes their bookkeeping neatly only has the last steps left when preparing the annual accounts: choosing the accounting policies, completing the notes and checking whether the balance sheet balances. Those steps are in the step-by-step plan for preparing annual accounts.

If you are in the micro or small class, the wizard is built for that: you enter your figures per balance sheet item and see in between whether assets and liabilities still equal each other.