Product spotlight: getting MTD done

Craig Clarke
Director of Product

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax lands this month - April 2026 - and we’re more than ready for it.

We’ve been fully focused on building the best Making Tax Digital (MTD) solution on the market. That has meant spending a lot of time speaking to accountants and bookkeepers about what MTD will actually look like when it’s part of everyday business life and I want to share what we heard from practices and how their insights are shaping our product decisions. 

Building for MTD is not just about supporting regulation. It’s about understanding your operational reality as you manage hundreds of clients and multiple deadlines. Our aim has always been the same: deliver an HMRC-recognised solution that reduces stress, offers great value, and gives businesses confidence that MTD can work smoothly at scale. 

We’ve spent the past year proving and evolving our solution in HMRC’s testing phase so it’s ready and robust, with both quarterly and final year-end submissions completed.

Most practices know the MTD basics by now, so the focus is shifting to navigating the change. That means putting the right pricing, processes and tools in place early so quarterly reporting feels manageable when the deadlines hit. 

Making MTD work in reality

One consistent message coming from practices was that success will come down to preparation, not just compliance. The rules may be clear, but the real challenge is making quarterly reporting work operationally across a practice. In our conversations three themes came up repeatedly. In each of these, some practical steps now can make a real difference.

Pricing

Practices are rethinking how they value their time in a world of quarterly work rather than annual submissions. Don’t undersell yourself and choose a clear, tiered pricing model now that protects your margins and gives your clients options.

Planning

MTD is not just a filing task. It’s a workflow connecting bookkeeping, client communication, internal review and submission. Plan a clear MTD strategy that everyone understands, assigning direct ownership so you know exactly who’s doing the work and who’s chasing the clients.

Process

The more manual admin you remove early, the easier MTD becomes to manage at scale. Review your software ecosystem to ensure your tools actually work for you, then automate the heavy lifting before the deadlines hit.

For our part, these key themes really shaped our thinking on how we should lay foundations that make MTD workable in practice. Here’s what we’ve focused on:

Bookkeeping is the bedrock

One of our earliest decisions was to focus heavily on bookkeeping. While the submission step might seem like the priority, the real friction comes much earlier. If your bookkeeping data is unreliable, quarterly reporting becomes difficult and expensive.

We saw practices spending time fixing records rather than reviewing them and knew that by strengthening the foundations in accurate data capture, we could ensure everything to follow would become easier 

By integrating smart data capture, bank feeds and AI reconciliation into every journey, FreeAgent unlocks automated bookkeeping for every business.

Secure bank feeds keep data flowing across large portfolios, with our leading AI categorisation reducing manual effort by categorising transactions from day one. Our system learns from you each step of the way to build a personalised model.

To complement transaction import, we have Smart Capture for data entry. Snap photos of receipts on the go, or upload them easily. We scan and extract data automatically, as well as match up to a bank transaction to close the bookkeeping loop.

Submission simplified

When you’ve laid a strong bookkeeping foundation, the next challenge is visibility.

Practices told us they need to know exactly where every client stands in the reporting cycle or managing deadlines across a large portfolio becomes painful.

So we had to make our MTD workflow clear and controlled.

The MTD area and Practice Dashboard give teams a single view of submission status across all clients. You can see what’s ready, what needs review and what’s coming up next.

From there, the process becomes consistent and repeatable. Review the data, approve the update, and submit. Quarterly updates and final declarations follow the same simple structure, which makes it easier for teams to manage work across multiple clients.

The aim was not to add more functionality, but to remove uncertainty from the submission process.

Unlock scalable growth

The final piece of the puzzle is scale.

Many practices want to grow their client base, but compliance work can quickly become a bottleneck if it relies on manual effort and fragmented workflows.

This is where practice-level tooling becomes critical.

Features like bulk bank feed reconsent remove loads of admin in a single step. Instead of chasing clients individually, feeds can be restored across your entire portfolio, without interrupting the flow of data.

Alongside that, tools like the MTD submission summary report and alerting help practices stay ahead of deadlines and manage reporting cycles with more confidence.

Taken together, these features are about turning MTD from a series of individual tasks into a repeatable system that works across your whole practice and for all clients, regardless of size.

For those looking to take their first step into digital tools, FreeAgent is the easiest option to use and has award-winning support. Bank feeds and automatic categorisation, all accessible in our mobile app, deliver the bookkeeping solution they need for their MTD journey.

For larger clients, FreeAgent has all the power they need to maximise their MTD workflows every day, with the management tools you need to keep everything running smoothly. 

More MTD help is at hand

While we’ll pass the first deadline in April, our work (like your work) on MTD will continue. Next stops on our features roadmap include:

• bulk filing and automated filing options
• mobile app MTD review and submission
• landlord rental statement extraction 

Each of these will build on the same principle that’s guided our work so far. Listen carefully to how practices actually work, then build tools that remove friction from those workflows.

I’ll be back soon with the next Product Spotlights with detailed breakdowns for how we’re improving how you can handle landlord and Construction Industry Scheme (CIS) clients.

In the meantime, we’re here to help you at every step of the MTD journey. Existing Practice Partners can book a free MTD action plan. Or you can request a free trial to see how FreeAgent can help you get MTD done.