An accountancy practice website carries a few legal obligations that a bakery's or a plumber's does not. None of them are complicated, and none of them cost anything to get right, but they are easy to miss because nobody collects them in one place. This page does that: what the money laundering rules actually require, when the word Chartered can and cannot be used, what a limited company has to show, and the privacy basics around a contact form.

Every claim below links to the rule itself rather than to someone's summary of it, so you can read the source and judge for yourself.

Who supervises your practice, and where that has to be said

Under the UK's money laundering regulations, an accountancy service provider must be supervised for anti-money laundering purposes. GOV.UK's own guidance sets out that this supervision comes from one of two places: HMRC, or one of the accountancy bodies that supervise their own members, which includes ICAEW, ACCA and AAT. If you are already supervised by one of those bodies through your membership, you do not need a separate HMRC registration on top of it.

The regulations themselves do not say a website has to display who supervises the practice. What they require is that the supervision actually exists. Plenty of practices choose to state their supervisory body on the site anyway, usually in the footer or on the about page, because it is a plain answer to a question a cautious prospective client might otherwise have to ask directly.

If your practice is not currently supervised by anyone, that is worth fixing before anything else on this page. It is the one item here that is about the practice itself rather than the website.

Using the word "Chartered" on a website

"Chartered" is not a description a firm can use just because one person working there happens to hold a chartered qualification. ICAEW's own regulations governing the use of the description define an eligible "member firm" by who actually owns and controls it. A sole practitioner who is themselves a Chartered Accountant qualifies automatically. A partnership, LLP or company only qualifies if more than half the voting rights, or more than half the shares in the case of a company, are held by Chartered Accountants or by other qualifying member firms.

A firm that does not meet that test is not automatically barred from ever using the word. ICAEW's regulations allow a firm to apply for a dispensation, decided at the Regulatory Board's discretion, if it wants to describe itself as Chartered without meeting the ownership test outright.

The other two bodies work differently again, and are covered in their own right in the section below rather than repeated here, because the mechanism is not the same for all three.

The company details a limited company site has to show

If your practice trades as a limited company, the Companies Act 2006 and the regulations made under it require certain details to appear on your business letters, order forms and, explicitly, your website. Regulation 25 of the Company, Limited Liability Partnership and Business Names Regulations 2015 lists them: the part of the United Kingdom the company is registered in, its company registration number, and the address of its registered office.

In practice this usually means a line in the footer, on the about page or on the contact page. It is a short, one-off addition, and it is one of the few items on this page that a search of your own site will confirm in seconds: if that line is not there, it needs to be.

A contact form collects personal data the moment someone fills it in, which puts UK GDPR in play. Article 13 of the UK GDPR requires that when personal data is collected directly from someone, such as through a form, they are told at that point who is collecting it and what it will be used for. In practice that means a working link to a privacy policy near the form, not a policy that exists somewhere on the site but is never referenced.

Cookies are a separate rule with a similar shape. Regulation 6 of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations generally requires consent before information is stored on or read from a visitor's device. There is a carve-out: storage that is strictly necessary to provide something the visitor actually asked for is exempt from that consent requirement, which is why a shopping basket or a login session does not need a cookie banner, but an analytics or advertising cookie does.

Neither of these rules is specific to accountancy. They apply to any UK business website with a form or a cookie on it. They are included here because a practice that gets AML supervision and the word Chartered right, and then leaves a contact form with no privacy policy in sight, has not actually finished the job.

Where the three bodies differ

ICAEW, ACCA and AAT each set their own rules for what a member or a member firm may call itself, and the three are genuinely different from each other rather than three versions of the same idea.

ICAEW

As set out above, ICAEW ties the "Chartered Accountants" description to who owns and controls the firm, not to whether a Chartered Accountant simply works there. The detail is on ICAEW firms and the "Chartered Accountants" description online.

ACCA

ACCA's own guidance is explicit that its Global Practising Regulations require any member acting as a principal in an accountancy practice, or otherwise working in public practice other than as a supervised employee or subcontractor, to hold an ACCA practising certificate before offering services such as accounts preparation or tax work to the public. Basic book-keeping is treated separately and does not require one. The detail is on ACCA practices: naming your firm and advertising online.

AAT

AAT's rule centres on a licence rather than a certificate. AAT's own eligibility guidance states that self-employed members offering bookkeeping or accountancy services to the public must hold a valid AAT licence and be supervised for anti-money laundering compliance, with exemptions for those already regulated by another chartered or certified body, those working purely as subcontractors, and unpaid voluntary work. The detail is on AAT licensed members: licence status and logo use on a website.

What none of this decides

Every rule on this page sets a floor: who has to supervise you, when a word can be used, what a company has to disclose, and how a form has to treat someone's data. None of it has anything to do with whether the site actually reads well, loads quickly, or persuades a visitor to get in touch. A practice can meet every requirement above and still have a website that quietly loses work to a better one.

That is a separate question from this page, and one we go into on web design for accountants. This page is only about the floor: get it right once, and it stays right without needing to think about it again.