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PDF Diary: Companies House e-accounts wins information management award. By John Stokdyk

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13th Dec 2006
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At what must be the UK technology industry's biggest event of the year, the Companies House e-accounts project was given the Premier Project Award at the British Computer Society's Information Management Awards last week.

Having written a case study about the e-accounts scheme for AccountingWEB's PDF and Adobe Zone, I was invited by Adobe to the ceremony at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London. Crammed into the hotel's ballroom with 1,500 other audience members, we sat next to the Companies House table, which included the in-house accountant, several programmers, managers and the agency's marketing director, Lynn Lynch.

The e-accounts project was nominated in three categories: business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C) and the Premier project category. Having taken a close look at the project and understood its significance for anyone who has to file company accounts, I thought Companies House was in with a good shout.

Since the e-accounts service was opened to accept dormant company accounts in the spring, more than 55,000 people have used the downloadable Adobe PDF forms to file their accounts. Once the user has typed in the information and submitted it (with an electronic authentication code), the data is fed back through the Companies House website, validated and then processed by back-room computers.

But the competition was stiff. The project was up against more than 70 rivals, including teams M&S, BT, T-mobile, Royal Bank of Scotland, Shell, New Scotland Yard and a host of other blue chip organisations.

The B2B and B2C awards were the first ones to be announced, senior project manager Ros James told me that if they didn't pick up one of those, the chances were slim of landing the Premier prize. Voca got the B2B prize for its payments platform and Netintelligence was awarded the B2C prize for its Safekeeper scheme.

After a depressing interlude while all the other project prizes were handed out, it came as a shock when BBC news reader Kate Silverton read out "Companies House" as the winner of the top project prize. Ros was accompanied on her long march to the stage by an enthusiastic Simon Skillen from Adobe UK.

Having completed the first phase of the e-accounts project, covering dormant and abbreviated accounts, the Companies House e-accounts team has now moved on to the next phase, completing the full small company accounts form.

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