Making Tax Digital for small businesses: a Lancashire guide

Making Tax Digital is HMRC’s way of saying: stop typing numbers from a spreadsheet into a website. For VAT-registered businesses that is already the law. For Income Tax, the timetable has moved more than once, which is why you should build the habit now, not the week a letter arrives.

What ‘digital link’ actually means

It does not mean ‘I own a laptop’. It means the figures on the return travel from recognised software to HMRC without being retyped. A photo of a notebook is not a digital link. Xero, FreeAgent, Sage and QuickBooks are. That is why we treat software as the service, not a logo in the footer.

If you are VAT-registered today

You should already be filing through software. If your ‘system’ is a folder of PDFs and a brave afternoon on the Government Gateway, you are one inspection away from a conversation you will not enjoy. We will put you on a proper stack and file the next return from it.

If you are not VAT-registered yet

Watch the rolling 12-month turnover. The threshold moves. Crossing it without software is how people have a bad first quarter. We watch it with you.

What we set up

Bank feed, chart of accounts, VAT scheme, user access, and a named person who looks at the books. MTD is then a button, which is what it always should have been.