Making Tax Digital for Income Tax: what it asks of a trade app

Who it applies to, and when

HMRC's guidance sets the timing by qualifying income in an earlier tax year. If your qualifying income was over £50,000 for the 2024 to 2025 tax year, you should have started using Making Tax Digital for Income Tax from 6 April 2026 and can still sign up if you have not. If it was over £30,000 for the 2025 to 2026 tax year, you will need to use it from 6 April 2027. If it was over £20,000 for the 2026 to 2027 tax year, you will need to use it from 6 April 2028 (gov.uk, read 15 August 2026).

Those thresholds and dates are reproduced from HMRC's eligibility guidance on gov.uk on 15 August 2026. HMRC states it reviews your Self Assessment return each year to check your qualifying income. This is a summary of guidance, not tax advice: check your own position with your accountant.

What it actually requires

• Digital records of your self-employment and property income and expenses.
• Quarterly updates sent to HMRC from software that has been authorised.
• A tax return submitted through that software at the end of the year.
• Software you have authorised, with your accounting period checked, before you start.

What that means for your job app

A job management app is not automatically MTD software. Most of these products are the record of the work and the invoice, and the submission happens in accounting software they sync to. That is a perfectly good answer: Tradify syncs to Xero, Sage and QuickBooks Online on every tier, YourTradebase connects to QuickBooks and Xero, Gas Engineer Software adds QuickBooks, Xero and Sage on its Pro plan at £30 per user per month, and ServiceM8 lists accounting integrations on all plans. Powered Now is the outlier: it lists Making Tax Digital compliance on every plan and VAT return submission from its Professional tier, which is a different proposition from syncing to something else.

The question to ask a supplier

Do not ask whether the product is MTD compatible, because everyone says yes. Ask which piece of the chain it is: does it submit to HMRC itself, or does it hand data to accounting software that submits? Then ask your accountant which one they want to be looking at in April. The wrong answer here is not a fine, it is discovering in month nine that you are keying the same job into two systems.

VAT is a separate question

Making Tax Digital for VAT and Making Tax Digital for Income Tax are different regimes with different timelines. If you are VAT registered you are already inside the first one. The relevance to this comparison is narrow but real: Powered Now includes VAT return submission in its Professional tier, and several other products stop at exporting to your accountant.