Financial statements 2010 for limited companies

This instruction tells you which documents from the financial statements a limited liability company must report to the Trade Register if it hasn‘t done so previously, or if their registered financial statements need to be completed with some additional documents.

Financial statements documents to be submitted

1. All companies

• Profit and loss account and a balance sheet
• Account notes
• Report of operations
• Auditor's report if an audit has been carried out
• Notification reporting the date of the adoption of the financial statements and the decision of the General Meeting regarding the profit or loss of the company, given by a Board member or the Managing Director

Both the financial statements and the report of operations must be dated and signed by the Board of Directors and the Managing Director. The financial statements must contain the profit and loss account and the balance sheet for the previous accounting period. The auditor must mention the finished audit in the financial statements, and refer to the audit report in it. In the profit and loss account, the Business ID and official name of the company must be stated.

The report of operations must contain the information required in the Limited Liability Companies Act. A separate report of operations is required if the shares which a company has issued are subject to public trading or similar in a stock exchange under the legislation of a state within the European Economic Area, or the company’s operation is considered extensive (see Limited Liability Companies Act, Chapter 8, sections 3 and 5, and Accounting Act, Chapter 3, sections 1, 7 and 9). For other companies, the corresponding information can be submitted in the notes to the accounts instead of a report of operations.

2. Additional information required from some companies

• Consolidated financial statements, if they are included in the company’s financial statements, and consolidated audit report and possible consolidated cash flow statement.
• Cash flow statement (for public limited companies and limited companies with extensive operation, see Limited Liability Companies Act, Chapter 8, section 3, and Accounting Act, Chapter 3, sections 1 and 9).

Deadline for submitting documents

The financial statements should have been submitted within two months from their adoption. If your company has received a reminder letter from the National Board of Patents and Registration about the financial statements, you must submit them by the deadline stated in the letter.

Financial statements have been registered but are incomplete

In 2010 and previously, limited liability companies were able to submit their financial statement information by using the Tax return form 6 B and by attaching documents to it. When a company left or posted a tax return notification to a local tax office, some of the financial statements documents which should have been published were not forwarded to the Trade Register. This was the case, for example, with the notes to the accounts, the consolidated financial statements and the decision of the General Meeting regarding the profit or loss of the company.

Therefore you should submit this additional financial statements information directly to the Trade Register.

• Form to submit additional information (in Finnish)
• Form to submit additional information (in Swedish)
  

Processing of financial statements at the Trade Register

When you submit documents directly to the Trade Register, we check that all the required documents have been included before registration. We do not examine the documents as to their content, so they are registered as filed. The registration of the financial statements is added to the company’s Trade Register entries and the documents become publicly available in pdf format. We do not send any Trade Register extract to you once the registration is complete.

After registration, financial statements documents are public by law and they can be ordered from service providers or viewed through various services. We also disclose many documents to businesses and authorities. Businesses pick certain key figures from the electronic documents for processing into different services for their clients.

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