Admin time and waiting time

Admin time — hands on keyboard

across the whole estate

per company on average. This is the only number that more people make smaller. Two admins halve it.

Waiting time — nobody working

average per company, requests posted together

Post, HMRC decisions and directors' diaries. Hiring does not touch this. The only lever is starting it earlier.

The single most valuable scheduling decision in the programme. Waiting overlaps if requests go out together and stacks if they go out one at a time. Averaged across the portfolio that is days versus days per company — days lost each, for nothing, purely from sequencing.

Post every auth-code and UTR request on day one, for every client that needs one, before any other work starts. Those letters travel while everything else proceeds. Nothing else in this plan comes close to that for value per minute spent.

Where the waiting actually is

Step	Admin	Then waiting	Whose clock
Replacement auth code	25 min	10 days	Companies House posts it to the registered office and will not email it. Blocks every filing behind it.
Order the company UTR	25 min	14 days	HMRC, also by post. Sequence against any office change or the letter goes to the old address.
Chase a UTR	20 min	14 days	HMRC response time.
VAT registration	45 min	42 days	HMRC quote 4–12 weeks and can refuse. The longest single wait in the estate.
Object to a strike-off	30 min	14 days	The registrar's decision, not ours.
Overdue accounts	90 min	14 days	Their books have to arrive before anything can be prepared.
Portal handover	45 min	7 days	Finding 45 minutes in a director's diary. Small per client, and it is 44 of them.
Identity documents	20 min	7 days	Waiting for the client to send them.
Confirmation statement	20 min	none	£50, online, finished in the sitting. The fastest win on the board — and it is what clears priority 1.
Gateway — online or phone	40–55 min	none	Done same day where we hold the identity pack. 33 of 44 clients.
Social channels	75 min	none	Runs off the Google account we already created.

Nearly half the estate has no waiting at all. Every confirmation statement, every Gateway recovery on the strong and partial bands, every social setup and all our own record work is finished the day it is picked up. That work should never be scheduled behind something that is waiting on a letter.

Per company

Green is admin time, amber is waiting.admin waiting · bars are scaled to the slowest company.

What was verified, and what was not

Nothing on the list is already done — five claims tested

Auth codes: searched each client's own folder; CRP carries an explicit "NONE HELD", the other three have no code in any file. Identity documents: counted image and PDF files under every ID and KYC path for all seven — every one returned zero. Portals: the review of 20 August states 44 built, 39 bookable, 0 installs run. Filings: no log, receipt or submission record dated after 15 August exists anywhere in the working folders.

Two companies re-checked live at Companies House

W L Global (11667964) — Active, last statement filed 5 August 2025, next due 19 August 2026, so it went overdue and is still unfiled. Pinegrove (16353896) — still Active, proposal to strike off, statement still overdue from 13 April 2026, no discontinuance. Both correctly listed.

Two of forty-four, not forty-four. The rest rest on the 15 August verification plus the absence of any filing record since. Every filing runbook opens by re-checking that one company on the register — that is the control, and it is there for exactly this reason.

Separately: if anyone has filed something outside this system, it is not written down anywhere. That is its own problem and worth closing.