Making Tax Digital stopped being a someday problem this spring. Since 6 April 2026, sole traders earning over £50,000 have been legally required to keep digital records and send HMRC quarterly updates. Next April the threshold drops to £30,000, which catches most full-time vendors. The year after, £20,000, which is very nearly everyone with a serious van. Here's what's actually changing and how to get ahead of it without buying a filing cabinet's worth of stress.
The dates that matter
Straight from HMRC's eligibility guidance: if your self-employment income passed £50,000 on your last return, you should already be in the system as of this April. Over £30,000 in the 2025 to 2026 tax year? You're in from 6 April 2027. Over £20,000 in 2026 to 2027? You join from 6 April 2028.
Notice the trap in the wording. Next April's mandate is based on the tax year that finished this spring. The takings you're ringing up this summer decide whether the one after catches you. By the time HMRC writes to you, the qualifying year already happened.
What actually changes day to day
Three things, honestly summarised:
- Digital records: income and expenses logged in software or an app, not a carrier bag of receipts reconstructed each January. Photographing receipts as you go counts, and is frankly a better life.
- Quarterly updates: four times a year, your software sends HMRC a summary of income and expenses. Not a tax return, no clever adjustments needed, just totals kept reasonably current.
- A final declaration: the year still gets wrapped up once, replacing the old Self Assessment return, with the same deadlines you already know.
The quarterly rhythm is the real shift for vendors. The old way let you ignore the books for eleven months, then lose a week of your January to the shoebox. That option is going. In exchange, you find out roughly what tax you owe as the year goes along instead of discovering it in one horrible reveal, which for a seasonal business is genuinely useful. A monster August no longer ambushes you the following winter.
What to do about it this autumn
- Find your number: dig out last year's return. Over £30,000 of trading income? Pencil in April 2027 and stop treating this as background noise.
- Start logging now, voluntarily: the habit is the hard part, not the software. A season of photographing receipts and logging takings per event makes the switch a non-event.
- Ask your accountant one question: "which MTD software do you want me on?" If they do your return, their answer beats any review site's. No accountant? HMRC publishes a compatible software list, and the cheap end of it is plenty for a van.
- Separate the bank account: if business money still flows through your personal account, fix that first. Every MTD tool works better fed by one clean account.
💡 Pro Tip
Log money per event, not per month. It's the same effort at the till, satisfies the digital record requirement, and quietly gives you the per-gig profit numbers we banged on about in the mid-season money check. One habit, two jobs done.
The bit nobody says out loud
Most of the noise about MTD is dread, and some of it's fair: it's new admin, mandated, with software subscriptions attached. But the vendors already keeping digital records by choice will tell you the January shoebox ritual was never actually free. It cost a week of misery and, for plenty of traders, missed expenses worth real money. Fuel, pitch fees, that gas bottle bought in cash and forgotten: unlogged expenses are a voluntary tax donation. Quarterly logging claws them back.
Build the habit before the law needs it
Our free Takings & Sales Log and Event Profit & Loss Calculator get the per-event logging habit going today, ready to feed whichever software you land on.
Browse All TemplatesCheck your number this week. If it starts with a 3, your countdown to April 2027 is already running, and the easiest version of this change is the one you start on your own terms, in a quiet October, rather than HMRC's terms in a frantic spring. Kettle on, last year's return out. Ten minutes.
