If you're a sole trader or landlord, there's a change this April that's easy to overlook until it's suddenly urgent: Making Tax Digital for Income Tax has arrived.
We're a web and digital agency, not accountants — so we won't pretend to give you tax advice, and you should talk to yours about the detail. But Making Tax Digital is fundamentally about getting your business digitally organised, and that's very much our world. Here's the plain-English version and the groundwork worth sorting now.
What's Actually Changing
From 6 April 2026, Making Tax Digital for Income Tax (MTD for IT) applies to sole traders and landlords whose gross income is over £50,000 a year. If that's you, two main things change:
- You must keep your business records digitally — no more shoebox of receipts and a spreadsheet knocked together at year end.
- You must send quarterly updates to HMRC using compatible software, rather than one annual return.
It's worth being clear that this is gross income — your total sales and rental income before expenses, not your profit. And if you have more than one source, they're added together. A self-employed turnover of £45,000 plus £6,000 in rental income puts you over the line.
It's also being phased in. The £50,000 threshold from April 2026 drops to £30,000 from April 2027, and £20,000 from April 2028 — so even if it doesn't apply to you yet, it likely will. Sorting your systems now means you're never scrambling.
The Good News: This Is a Nudge Worth Taking
Plenty of business owners are dreading this. But strip away the HMRC framing and it's really just: keep your records digitally and stay on top of them through the year. That's something every well-run business benefits from anyway — better visibility of your numbers, no year-end panic, and far less time lost to admin.
The businesses that struggle won't be the ones with complex finances. They'll be the ones still running on paper, memory and good intentions.
Getting Your Digital House in Order
Here's the practical groundwork — the part we can actually help with.
Get proper business software in place. You'll need MTD-compatible accounting software. Get it set up and learn it well before April rather than the week of your first deadline.
Separate your business properly. A dedicated business bank account, a professional email address, and your tools in one place make digital record-keeping far simpler. If you're still running your business from a personal Gmail account, that's worth fixing — we explain why in our piece on professional business email.
Use a setup that talks to itself. The less you re-key things by hand, the fewer mistakes and the less time wasted. The right combination of tools — accounting, email, file storage, and the systems on your website — should join up. A tidy Microsoft 365 setup gives you email, document storage and a single organised base to work from.
Consider where your enquiries and invoices live. If your website takes bookings, enquiries or payments, those records are part of your business picture too. Making sure they're captured cleanly — rather than scattered across an inbox — makes everything downstream easier.
Where We Fit In
We won't file your taxes. But getting a business digitally organised — professional email, sensible file storage, joined-up systems, a website that captures enquiries properly instead of losing them — is exactly what we do day to day. For a lot of small businesses, MTD is the prompt that finally gets the digital basics sorted, and they're better off for it well beyond tax.
If April's deadline has nudged you to get your digital setup in order, get in touch. We'll help you put the foundations in place — calmly, before the rush.
This article is general information, not tax advice. For your specific obligations, speak to your accountant or check the guidance on GOV.UK.
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