All but the smallest businesses will soon be required to keep their records digitally.

Making Tax Digital (MTD) requires all VAT registered businesses to keep digital records and send quarterly updates to HMRC using compatible software. 

HMRC has extended the MTD roll out to self-employed individuals and landlords with an income of more than £50,000 from April 2026. Then £30,000 from April 2027 and £20,000 from 2028. This will be include the great majority of self employed and landlords who will be required to file quarterly income summaries and a final update to the tax return at the end of the tax year. If you have not done so already you should start to plan for this now.

The Government will not be providing any software. Commercial software will need to be used. I use Quickbooks for my clients. Quickbooks software is quick, reliable and cost effective. They are one of the market leaders in on-line accounting software. I chose them over Xero and Free Agent, which does basically the same thing, because they offer excellent on-line AND telephone support.  

I have ‘onboarded’ over 40 of my clients onto Quickbooks. It is important to appreciate that this is book-keeping software albeit on the cloud. I have passed the Quickbooks Online Advanced Certification. My clients have varying degrees of book-keeping / IT experience so I work with them according to their ability. The only accounting you will need to do is prepare and send out your sales invoices, make sure that you are paid on time and upload digital invoices to your expenses. I update, categorise expenses and review your Quickbooks every Thursday so that by the weekend you know exactly how your business is doing.

Quickbooks also comes with smart phone apps so that you can send out estimates / sales invoices on the move;  snap your receipts and keep your mileage records. It saves a ton of time.

In addition to MTD compliance, Cloud accounting automates the accounting function and keeps my clients in touch with how much profit they have made, what cash they have and the sales invoices they need to collect.