What does Making Tax Digital mean for tradespeople?
Making Tax Digital means keeping your business records digitally and sending HMRC quarterly updates through recognised software. It has covered VAT-registered businesses since 2022, and from April 2026 it started reaching sole traders — incomes over £50,000 first. The software that has to be MTD-recognised is your bookkeeping software. Your quoting and invoicing app does not — it just has to feed it clean records.
What Making Tax Digital actually requires
Two things, and the first is bigger than it sounds. You keep a digital record of your business income and expenses — not a folder of paper invoices you hand over in January, and not a shoebox of merchant receipts. And you send HMRC an update every quarter from software it recognises, with a final declaration at the end of the year in place of the single Self Assessment return you file now. The quarterly updates are not four tax bills — they are running totals of income and expenses — but they do mean the records have to exist all year, not be reconstructed each winter.
If you are VAT-registered you have been living under this for a while: Making Tax Digital for VAT has applied to all VAT-registered businesses since 2022, and if your VAT returns already go through your accounting software, that part is done. The new one is Making Tax Digital for Income Tax, which replaces the way sole traders do Self Assessment — and it is arriving in waves, by income.
Who is caught, and when?
The trigger is your qualifying income: broadly, your gross income from self-employment and property added together — your turnover before expenses come off, not your profit. A subcontractor who turned over £55,000 with £20,000 of materials inside it is in the first wave, however modest the year's profit was. HMRC checks it from the Self Assessment return you have already filed:
| Qualifying income | In from | Judged on |
|---|---|---|
| Over £50,000 | 6 April 2026 | Your 2024–25 tax return |
| Over £30,000 | 6 April 2027 | Your 2025–26 tax return |
| Over £20,000 | 6 April 2028 | Your 2026–27 tax return |
Below £20,000, nothing is mandated yet. If you trade through a limited company, Making Tax Digital for Income Tax does not apply to the company's profits — though it can still catch rental or self-employed income on your personal return. Do not take the edges of any of this from a guide, including this one: gov.uk's eligibility checker has the current thresholds, dates and exemptions, and they have moved before.
Do you need new software?
You need one piece of recognised software: the thing that keeps the ledger and sends the quarterly updates. The mainstream accounting packages tradespeople already use — Xero, QuickBooks, FreeAgent, Sage and the rest — are built for it, and HMRC publishes a list of recognised products. If your bookkeeping lives in a spreadsheet, “bridging” software exists to file from it, but a quarterly deadline four times a year is a strong argument for letting real bookkeeping software do the adding up.
And you do not have to run it yourself. A bookkeeper or accountant can keep the digital records and file the updates on your behalf — for plenty of one-person firms, an hour of a bookkeeper's month is the whole compliance plan. What they will ask you for is the same thing the software would: a complete, accurate record of what you invoiced.
Is Speak to Quote Making Tax Digital software?
No, and it is not trying to be. Making Tax Digital lives where your ledger lives — the running record of income and expenses that files to HMRC. Speak to Quote makes the documents: the quotes, estimates and invoices that put the income in that ledger in the first place. It does not submit anything to HMRC, and nothing on this page claims otherwise.
What a quoting app owes you in an MTD world is upstream of the filing: every invoice numbered and dated, the VAT on its own line with your VAT number on the document, the deposit and any CIS deduction shown, and a record of what was actually paid and when. Get that right and the digital ledger — whoever keeps it — is data entry, not archaeology.
Getting your invoices into the software that is
Every invoice you build in Speak to Quote already carries what a bookkeeper needs: the number, the invoice and due dates, the client, the net, VAT and gross figures, and the balance after a deposit or CIS deduction. The Download CSV button on the Invoices tab (and on History, for the whole archive) exports it as one row per document — type, number, dates, client, net, VAT rate, VAT, gross, deposit, CIS, balance, status, and the paid, sent and accepted dates. It opens in Excel, and it is deliberately plain: dates as dates, money as numbers — the shape an import screen or a bookkeeper expects, not a claim to be a Xero file.
Two habits make the export worth having. Mark invoices paid when the money lands, so the status column tells the truth; and let every job produce a document, so the archive is the record of what you billed. Hand the CSV over monthly or quarterly and your bookkeeping software — the recognised one — has its income side without anyone retyping figures off paper.
What should you do before it is your turn?
- Check your qualifying income against the table above — on gross income, not profit — and confirm the detail on gov.uk.
- Decide who keeps the ledger — you in a recognised package, or a bookkeeper — before your first quarter, not the week it is due.
- Tighten the paperwork now. Numbered, dated invoices with the VAT split out are what make quarterly updates painless, whoever files them.
The invoicing side is the part Speak to Quote takes off your plate: dictate the job, send the invoice, mark it paid, export the lot. The builder page shows what the documents look like — CIS deduction included — and the how it works page covers the rest.
This is general guidance for tradespeople, not tax advice. The thresholds, dates and exemptions above are HMRC's to change, and an accountant who knows your business is the right place to take the edge cases.