On 6 April 2027, Making Tax Digital for Income Tax reaches its second group. It will apply to sole traders and landlords with qualifying income above £30,000, based on their 2025/26 tax return. HMRC estimates 970,000 people to join the scope.
The first wave, for income above £50,000, started in April 2026. The second is a different test for bookkeepers. These clients are smaller and their records may be patchier or you never know, the best too. Plenty still rely on a spreadsheet, a shoe box full of receipts, or a panicked phone call in January. Under MTD they must keep digital records, send quarterly updates and make a final declaration, all through compatible software.
For a practice already juggling VAT, payroll and year-end deadlines, understanding the rules is the easy part. The hard part is fitting four extra submission points a year for dozens of clients into the diary without the work spilling into off hours. Add clients who ignore HMRC letters until the last minute, and the pressure builds quickly.
What you should be doing now
1. Work out who is in scope. Go through your client list and check their 2025/26 figures. Qualifying income is gross self-employment and property income combined, before expenses, so a client with £32,000 turnover and a thin profit is still caught. Proactively reach out without waiting for HMRC to notify them.
2. Sort out agent authorisation. You need MTD-specific authorisation through your HMRC agent services account before you can act for a client. Clients are slow to respond to authorisation requests, so start them early.
3. Talk to clients before they hear it elsewhere. Write to clients within the scope this winter. Explain what is changing and, more importantly, what you need from them. Be specific about how often they send records, which software they will use and who owns each quarterly update. A one-page summary works better than a long email.
4. Choose your software. Check that your software is on HMRC's list of recognised products for MTD for Income Tax. Decide how you will treat clients who insist on spreadsheets, since bridging software is allowed. Make sure the MTD software you choose integrates well within your practice's workflows.
5. Tidy the records. Separate personal and business bank accounts for your clients. Consistent categories and receipts captured as they happen will save you hours every quarter. Foster recordkeeping habits among your clients with an MTD-compliant software that has a mobile app to ease the habit.
6. Build a quarterly routine. Standard quarters end on 5 July, 5 October, 5 January and 5 April, with updates due by the 7th of the following month. Set up recurring tasks with internal deadlines a week earlier, so nothing depends on memory.
7. Review fees and capacity. Quarterly reporting is extra work. Price it properly and agree on the scope with each client rather than absorbing it. Look at your busiest months and work out where the new deadlines land.
Learn from a practice that has been through it
You don't have to work it all out alone. We sat down with CIGMA Accounting Ltd. who shared how they prepared their first wave of clients for the first quarterly submission. This article is a useful read before you finalise your own plan.
Why connected technology matters
The administrative tasks around MTD are where practices lose time — onboarding clients, chasing records, retyping figures, tracking who has submitted, and what ate into margins. Every manual handover is also a chance for a mistake or a missed due date.
When your bookkeeping software, client communication, task tracking, and deadline calendars are connected, information moves once and stays visible. Bank feeds bring in transactions. Clients upload documents to one place. Your team can see which clients are ready to submit and which are still holding things up at a glance.
It also changes how you manage your own capacity. If you can see on the 28th that 10 clients are still missing October records, you can act. If your information sits across spreadsheets, email threads, and a wall calendar, you find out later.
Where Zoho Practice fits
Zoho Practice is practice management software built for accountants and bookkeepers. It gives you one place for client records, task templates, and recurring workflows. Onboarding becomes smoother with built-in and customisable LOEs. Quarterly update tasks can be created for every in-scope client, with an owner and a due date, instead of being set up manually each time.
Clients can share documents through a portal rather than buried email attachments. It connects seamlessly with Zoho Books, a cloud-based MTD-compliant software, which is free to stay compliant with MTD for Income Tax. You can also support MTD for Income Tax filing and compliance for spreadsheet clients through Zoho Practice.
Zoho offers ICB members 1-year free access to Zoho Practice, Zoho Books, and more.
Start with the next five months
As of now, April 2027 is five months away. This month, list the clients in scope and request agent authorisation. By January, have your client letters out and your software decisions made. By March, run a practice quarter on a handful of clients so the problems appear before the real deadline does.
Practices that treat MTD as a workflow problem, rather than a software one, will cope best. The rules are fixed. How you organise your team and clients around them is up to you.