In early August, HMRC confirmed that more than 436,000 sole traders and landlords had submitted their first Making Tax Digital quarterly update (and only just over 570,000 had signed up), against roughly 864,000 estimated to be in scope. That could read as a new process finding its feet, or as a lot of firms, clients and taxpayers still working out what quarterly reporting requires of them. Both are probably true, but neither is really the point.
What matters more is what has changed underneath those numbers. MTD ITSA requires in-scope clients to keep digital records and submit totals four times a year, instead of filing a single annual Self-Assessment return. Each update builds on the last – a financial position that used to get compiled once, after the fact, now gets reported in stages as the year goes along.
That’s a bigger change than the paperwork suggests and firms and clients now have visibility of their financial position that they didn’t have before. Of course, what they don’t automatically have is an insight of what these numbers tell them about their business. A quarterly update tells HMRC category totals but not trends in margins, seasonal changes, cashflow risks or other factors that could impact the business. Someone still has to look at the numbers and decide what they mean for potential tax liabilities, future cashflows and general business performance. All these things become a genuine reason to pick up the phone.
That’s genuinely harder to do this year than it sounds with clients still getting used to keeping records continuously rather than handing over a shoebox at the year-end, software isn’t fully bedded in. Most practices are already stretched just getting submissions out the door – this means treating each quarterly submission as one more thing to clear before moving to the next client isn’t a failure of imagination, it’s a reasonable response to a demanding process.
However, if this becomes the permanent pattern, MTD ITSA will end up delivering nothing beyond the compliance it was built for and have no long-term benefit for the practice. The alternative doesn’t need to be elaborate; it could just be a short conversation after each filing – once the quarterly data has been reviewed by human or AI tools – built into the workflow. If the client’s numbers look better or worse than expected, reach out to the client and offer to discuss it with them.
The compliance requirement is fixed but what a firm does after submission is a choice, made four times a year rather than once. So perhaps the question isn’t whether MTD ITSA is more work – it plainly is – but rather whether “submitted” is where the process ends, or just a starting point for a conversation with the client.
Meet the 20:20 Innovation team on stand H11 & J11 at Accountex Summit Manchester, taking place at Manchester Central on the 15 September 2026. Register for your free ticket here.
