Search “making tax digital sole trader reddit” right now and it's wall-to-wall confusion — who's in, when, and what software counts. Here's the plain-English version, minus the panic.
Try Amy free for 14 days →MTD for Income Tax (MTD ITSA) starts 6 April 2026 for sole traders and landlords with qualifying income over £50,000, then £30,000 from April 2027 and £20,000 from April 2028. If you’re in scope you’ll need to keep digital records and send HMRC a quarterly update through compatible software — the annual shoebox-in-January routine is over.
The recurring worry in the threads is the same: “I’m a one-man band, I’m not running accounting software four times a year.” You don’t have to. The trick is to keep the digital records as a byproduct of normal work, so the quarterly update is a non-event.
If your self-employment + property income is over £50,000 (2026), yes — from 6 April 2026 you must keep digital records and file quarterly. £30k joins in 2027, £20k in 2028. Under that, not yet — but the direction of travel is clear, so getting tidy now costs nothing and saves the scramble.
Each income and expense logged digitally with a date, amount and category — not a carrier bag of receipts you total up in January. The point of MTD is that the record exists as you go.
Capture as you work instead of saving it all up. With TradesOffice you text Amy on WhatsApp — “invoice Dave £2,400”, a photo of a receipt — and every entry is stored as an MTD-categorised digital record automatically. At quarter-end your accountant gets a clean export; nothing to reconstruct.
No — and it’s honest about that. It produces the MTD-quality digital records and a clean quarterly pack; your accountant (or an MTD-approved filing tool) submits. It’s the capture layer that makes the filing trivial, not the filing itself.
Yes. They get a quarterly pack plus CSV/PDF exports with everything categorised to HMRC’s expense categories, CIS and VAT separated — so there’s nothing to chase or re-key. Xero/QuickBooks sync is on the roadmap.
Text Amy as you work and your digital records build themselves — so the quarterly update is already done. Free for 14 days, no card.
Try Amy free →