Product spotlight: navigating a transformative year

Craig Clarke
Director of Product

As Director of Product, I’m fortunate to work alongside the incredibly talented team that builds FreeAgent. With this new series of regular product spotlights, I want to give a peek behind the curtain at what’s driving us forward and where we’re focusing our efforts as we continue to build a better FreeAgent for all our customers. 

A transformative year

2026 promises to be a transformative year for practices and their clients. With regulatory changes like Making Tax Digital (MTD) reshaping the UK compliance landscape, and the rise of new technology already fundamentally shaking up what it means to run a business, the year ahead promises to be one to keep us all on our toes.

We always try to ground ourselves in your challenges - from the biggest existential threats down to the grit in the machinery that’s grinding your gears. To find the solutions to these problems we’re homing in on three main goals.

The first is helping accountants and bookkeepers - and their clients - to get MTD done. We want our HMRC-recognised solution to reduce your stress levels and offer great value - without compromising on capability.

Second is building a FreeAgent that’s fit for a broader range of businesses - giving you control without complexity and giving financial confidence to business owners.

Finally, we’ll stay at the front of the wave of new technologies that are reshaping our lives. We’ll help you swap manual tasks for automation and build a business that’s ready for anything.  

A bolder FreeAgent

When I became Director of Product back in 2023, we set out on a new path to put a bigger focus on meeting the needs of our Practice Partners. We’re incredibly proud of FreeAgent being the easiest way for small business owners to stay in control of their finances, and we’ll keep pushing our small business functionality forward, but we recognised that there were gaps in our capability for accountants and bookkeepers. 

So we set out to change that. 

The perfect fit for practices for MTD and beyond

As MTD for Income Tax shifts from a concept to a reality, the partnership between business owners and their accountants has never been more vital. Our goal is to ensure that you and your clients can step confidently into a successful new era defined by Making Tax Digital. Here’s how we’re helping with that:

• A proven MTD solution: we successfully navigated the HMRC pilot programme to deliver both quarterly and year-end submissions. FreeAgent is HMRC recognised and ready to support your firm’s transition today. Find out more on our MTD for Income Tax hub.
• The MTD command centre: your Practice Dashboard now features full MTD for Income Tax submission status and upcoming obligations for every client in a single view.
• Workflow control: new flexible tax permissions let you customise exactly what clients can access. You can build client approvals directly into the submission flow and we’ll soon be delivering the option to automate quarterly submissions.
• Bulk bank feed consent: it only takes one click to reconsent every client bank feed. Hours of admin removed. No chasing clients. No downtime in workflows. Set it up by following the steps in our Knowledge Base.
• Accurate property ownership: for landlords with shared properties, our ownership split feature ensures the tax liability view is always spot on.
• CIS simplified: complementing our CIS solution, CIS for subcontractors can now be explained directly from bank transactions with no invoices required.

You want MTD to fit into your day-to-day workflow - not disrupt it every quarter, so we’ve focused on removing any friction from our solution. That means the workflows are joined up and there’s real control over submissions and visibility across all your clients.

A connected system

The key to unlocking your MTD opportunities lies in choosing tools that simplify compliance while empowering digital transformation. Your bookkeeping choice is one piece of the puzzle in running an effective practice, and we’re committed to investing in adding to our integrations - like the recently released Fathom and Pleo - to deliver a curated stack that supports all of your workflows.

Getting business owners back to business

We know no one starts a business to become a full-time bookkeeper (except full-time bookkeepers!), so we’re focused on making admin invisible.  

• Manage business on the move: we’ve brought Projects to our mobile app, and with Tap to Pay you can now take invoice payments from customers in person.
• Split transactions: unlock even more banking wins with simple split actions, making it easy to split a single bank transaction across multiple invoices or bills.
• Property management made simple: our dedicated landlord accounts include a tailored chart of accounts to help you record and reconcile rental income automatically. 
• In-depth reporting: our new Management Reports allow you to collate and customise financial data. It’s never been easier to see the bigger picture of business performance.
• Bulk Find and Fix: quickly correct categories, VAT rates, and descriptions in bulk, making error correction faster, easier, and much less of a headache. Read more on our blog.

And with FreeAgent there’s real room for every business to grow, as all of our core features are included together, meaning there’s never a need to upgrade packages.

Transformative accounting: stepping forward with confidence

The world is changing at furious speed with advances in AI generating headlines and much-vaunted promises. FreeAgent’s AI automation has been market leading since 2018, and is baked into our core workflows to transform productivity for you and your clients.

• Smarter categorisation: our AI system now automatically categorises up to 80% of bank transactions. This saves you hours of manual reconciliation.
• Effortless admin: simplify and automate how you process receipts and bills with Smart Capture, now with automatic matching to a broader range of bank transactions.
• Data-driven insights: we’ve expanded Radar to highlight trends and issues instantly. It puts the important stuff right at your fingertips at the right time for taking informed action.
• Deeper analysis in an instant: with Performance Benchmarking there are no manual reports, no detective work. Just instant clarity and competitive context built right in.

What lies ahead?

We’re proud of how far we’ve come, but we’re even more excited about what’s next, continuing to deliver solutions that help you and your clients stay in control of business finances in a rapidly changing world. This is what we’re focusing on next:

• A more complete compliance platform: cementing our position as the leading MTD solution with deeper automation and bulk workflows to help you get MTD done.
• Supercharging capability for every business: ensuring FreeAgent is fit for businesses of every size with sophisticated features like Tracking Groups, allowing you to tag and monitor specific business segments for deeper performance insights.
• Automation that unlocks productivity wins: eliminating the admin grind with automated rental extraction, compliance checks, and client health metrics to let you and your team focus on what matters.

You can check out our product timeline to see everything we’ve delivered recently and what’s coming next. 

I’ll be back with another product spotlight soon and will share more on what we’re building next. Until then, if you’d like to give FreeAgent a try, you can request a free trial and existing Practice Partners can book a call with an Account Manager through your Partner Zone to see how we can boost your firm in 2026.