It seems these days that I am only calling out shady business practices (see Broadcom). I’d much rather be singing the virtues of a company than reporting on how yet another company has been completely abhorrent. Your Company Formations Ltd (Company number: 9094616) have certainly put us through a difficult process recently.
It all started a few days ago, I had a notice to update my Confirmation Statement. Last year with Your Company Formations Ltd it was a simple process of going onto my account and filing the statement. It was £13 to do this. However this year they wanted £13 and an additional £55 fee for filing the document. I contacted them by email for an explanation.
To whom it may concern,
I am trying to do my confirmation statement, yet unlike last year it is now saying it wants £13 for the confirmation statement at companies house and £55 for “Confirmation Statement”?I am not sure why I can’t renew it for the same price I did last year?
— Our first email to “Your Company Formations Ltd”
I can send a confirmation statement to companies house directly myself for £13 so why would I pay 4x the price to file it with your website?
I was considering getting your address forwarding services for the year, as well as directors address, however this has affected my decision regarding this, and I will see about looking elsewhere unless there’s a decent reason why I can’t renew at around the same price?
Please explain.
The first reply from them was a price list for their address forwarding service. Something that I didn’t want to know about since I was trying to solve this issue. I suggested that they re-read my email and get back to me with the response I required. They got back to me and didn’t really have a clue that I had done my confirmation statement with them last year for £13, but they said that I must have done it directly with Companies House.
We went back and forth through numerous emails and eventually they removed the mystery £55+VAT, although they did not furnish me with an explanation as to why.
Thanks, I guess. Removing the £55+VAT is good but it still hasn’t really explained why it was there or anything. If I hadn’t checked and just done it as I had last year, I’d have paid £79 without realizing it?
— Our email to them, thanking Your Company Formations Ltd for removing the mysterious £55+VAT
I mean during this time with COVID and the pandemic this would easily cripple business that are struggling right now and mine being one of them.
I am not convinced that I have faith in your service anymore, since an answer to the original question still hasn’t been provided, and we’re 5? 6? emails in.
I think I’ll just file elsewhere and get the additional services I was looking at buying today elsewhere.
Unless of course you’re willing to offer a discount towards the new services I need, I’ll go elsewhere?
They jumped onto that I was looking for additional services and asked me what I was looking for. I said I was looking at getting “Directors’ Service Address – London”, “Registered Office Address – London” and “Mail Forwarding Service – London” and moving my registration at CH to those addresses. They said they’d be able to offer a 20% discount, so I thought I would go with it. I really wish I hadn’t now.
I asked some technical questions about how things worked and then paid for the service. They said that someone from compliance would be in touch soon to verify my ID. Compliance did get in touch and gave me the link to verify my ID. I clicked the link, it took me to Credas. It said “Loading the app”, and then stopped and said “Download our app on Google Play or the App Store”. I was very confused. I certainly don’t want to put an app I don’t trust on my phone.
I contacted the compliance team and said that I didn’t mind sending ID, but I wasn’t installing an app on my phone. I am quite glad I didn’t. The Credas app makes you have to take selfies in specific positions to “verify” your ID. I don’t know what other shady permissions it requires, since I wasn’t willing to run it on my phone. I did try it in BlueStacks though and it seemed to run, although without a unique key I could not find out exactly how it worked and wasn’t willing to provide the one I’d been given by Your Company Formations Ltd.
It was at this point I decided to call them. I spoke with a “Maria” on the phone, who was incredibly curt and unhelpful. At this point I was very stressed out with the whole situation. Now I just wanted to cancel the order since they wouldn’t be able to fulfill it any other way. She barely made any reference to there being another option, although she did mention in passing that I could go to the post office and send a certified copy at my expense although I am not sure if this is true because later they said that I would need to have a document signed by a notary public! Ridiculous.
I would have probably preferred to go to the post office, but I can’t now because I have to be isolated for 12 weeks and they would expect me to foot the entire cost too.
She said that in order to issue a refund, I would have to remove their address from Companies House. Their address was never listed on my companies house profile, although she was adamant that I had changed it – I had not. She said that I would need to go to companies house directly to change this back to an address that wasn’t theirs, since “they couldn’t do it”.
I asked to speak to their supervisor, and she said she was the supervisor. This made alarm bells go off in my head “a likely story.”. She said she would issue the refund once this address had changed and I called back.
I went onto my companies house registration and verified that the address hasn’t been updated at all, and rang them back to process the refund. Phil said I would receive an email confirmation in 5 minutes which I would need to verify to proceed.
30 minutes later the email still hadn’t come,I called them again. I spoke with Maria, and she said “I sent you the email at 15:34” and she had sent me an email, but just the one saying she wouldn’t refund me unless I had “changed my address back.”
At this point I was so frustrated, I just lied and said “It’s been removed.”, (not that it was ever on there in the first place) and she issued the refund which would come back to my account in 2-4 days. Finally.
Although as of yet, they still haven’t filed my Companies House Confirmation Statement (which was £13) either, which was the main thing I actually wanted to get done out of all this mess. If you look at our profile at Companies House, you can see that our details were never updated from what they originally were because it would certainly appear in the filing history and they haven’t done the filing for my Confirmation Statement either. Your Company Formations Ltd are unfortunately another company to avoid completely I’m afraid.
https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/11385086
Update 26/05/2020: They have said they have refunded the money from both the transactions. That’s one saving grace. I still receiving emails from the compliance team asking for ID though, now they are saying I could just photograph myself with the ID and documents without the app. It’s a bit too late now folks.
