MTD for Income Tax readiness checker

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax has been live since 6 April 2026 for sole traders and landlords with qualifying income over £50,000 — quarterly digital updates to HMRC instead of one annual return. The threshold drops to £30,000 from April 2027 and £20,000 from April 2028, so a business that isn't mandated yet is very likely to be within a couple of years. This tool takes your combined self-employment and property income and tells you which band you sit in, then lets you tick off the basics that make the switch painless rather than panicked.

What "ready" actually means

Readiness isn't really about software — it's about habit. The businesses that struggle with MTD are the ones still reconstructing a year's expenses from a shoebox of receipts every January. The businesses that don't struggle are logging income and costs close to the time they happen, in something that can export digitally, all year round. Quarterly updates just surface whatever habit was already there — good or bad — four times a year instead of once.

A worked example

A sole trader with £42,000 in self-employment income and no property income sits in the £30,000–£50,000 band — not mandated today, but mandated from 6 April 2027. That's roughly a year and a half of runway to build the habit of digital record-keeping before it becomes compulsory, rather than trying to build it in the same month as the first quarterly deadline. Ticking off the checklist above shows honestly how much of that runway is already used.

What TradesInvo does and doesn't do here

TradesInvo isn't MTD-filing software, and this tool won't pretend otherwise — that's a deliberate line, not a missing feature. What it does do is keep quotes, invoices and payment records clean and exportable, which is most of the actual work of staying MTD-ready. The filing itself — the quarterly updates, the End of Period Statement, the Final Declaration — is for your accountant or your MTD-compatible software to handle, on records you've already kept tidy. Once income and NI are estimated for the year, the tax & NI calculator gives a rough figure to set aside, and the Self Assessment countdown tracks the annual filing deadline that sits alongside MTD, not instead of it.

What this isn't

This doesn't check HMRC's current published thresholds and dates for you, doesn't account for income sitting right on a band boundary after allowable expenses, and doesn't cover partnerships or limited companies (MTD for Income Tax applies to sole traders and landlords). Always confirm your actual mandate date and obligations with HMRC or an accountant before treating a deadline as fixed.