Making Tax Digital - Place your bets now!

Published: 29/08/2018 By Robert Coyle

MTD (or Making Tax Digital) could well be the biggest thing you haven’t heard of.

Well what is it?

Making Tax Digital is a fundamental change in the way the UK Government administers YOUR tax. The Scary bit is it starts in April next year – which if you allow for time off for Christmas is only really  seven working months away.

Ultimately for every tax payer (be that a corporate or an individual) you are going to end up with your own digital tax account & to be reporting information (& paying tax) much more promptly than the current system. While all the detail isn’t yet clear , quarterly tax payments (& thus quarterly accounts for businesses/sole traders) could be on the cards.

MTD will start for VAT registered businesses for their first VAT return period starting after 1 April 2019. Further taxes (income tax, CGT, inheritance tax & the like) will be added thereafter. For VAT registered businesses you will also need to keep digital records & to record far more detail – the old hand written note book will not suffice!

WHAT THIS MEANS – the only practical way forward for smaller businesses (that don’t want to maintain their own IT) is to use Cloud based accounting software for record keeping & now is the time to decide which system to use.

As a practice we’ve decided to use QuickBooks as our main solution as we feel this is the best fit for our clients.

For further updates on MTD & the QuickBooks software we will be using  check our website, look out for our mailings (ask to be added to our mailing list) & also keep an eye out for our autumn seminar.

The key message however is that this is coming & you need to be deciding now how you intend to respond – if in doubt give us a call on 020 8661 7878 to discuss.

It’s time to place your MTD bet & select a solution to keep yourself compliant!