The first MTD deadline is this week. Here's what to learn from it before your turn comes.

This Thursday, 7 August, around 864,000 sole traders and landlords will hit the first Making Tax Digital quarterly deadline — the first time self-employed people in the UK have to send HMRC a digital summary of their income and expenses mid-year.

If your income is under £50,000, this deadline is not yours. But it will be: from April 2027 if you earn over £30,000, and April 2028 over £20,000. Which means the people scrambling this week are running your dress rehearsal for you, for free. Here is what it is showing.

Most people found out late

A quarter of the traders who have to file this week had not signed up for MTD a month before the deadline. One in five did not know the deadline existed. And in an earlier survey, only three in ten sole traders said they clearly understood what MTD actually requires.

That is not because tradespeople are careless — it is because HMRC's letters are easy to miss, the rules changed several times on the way here, and most people reasonably assumed their accountant would flag it. More than half of affected traders said their accountant had not properly explained it.

The lesson: nobody is coming to warn you. If your income is anywhere near £30,000, your start date is April 2027, and the time to find that out is now — not June 2027.

What the deadline actually asks for

Less than people fear. The quarterly update is one set of totals — income and expenses by category, covering April to July — sent through MTD-compatible software, usually by your accountant. It is not a tax return. There is no tax to pay with it. Your payment dates do not change.

The pattern in the run-up is not people defeated by the submission. It is people defeated by the records — four months of income and expenses sitting as paper invoices, bank statements and a glovebox of receipts, all needing to become digital records before anything can be summarised.

The lesson: the submission is minutes; the record-keeping is the job. And the record-keeping is only painful if you leave it until the quarter is over.

The habit beats the software

Traders who were already invoicing digitally and photographing receipts as they went have barely noticed this deadline — their accountant pulls the totals and files. Traders reconstructing a quarter from paper are spending their evenings on it.

The difference is not which software anyone bought in July. It is whether their normal workday was already producing digital records.

The lesson: start the habit before it is mandatory, while there is no deadline attached. A year of doing it casually beats a fortnight of doing it desperately.

Five things to do before your start date

1. Find out your date. Your qualifying income is your gross self-employment and property income — before expenses — from your Self Assessment return. Over £30,000: April 2027. Over £20,000: April 2028. HMRC writes to confirm, but check GOV.UK rather than waiting.
2. Stop creating paper records now. Every paper invoice you write today is something you — or someone you pay — will have to digitise later.
3. Talk to your accountant this autumn, not next spring. Ask two questions: "will you handle my quarterly submissions?" and "what do you need my records to look like?" Accountants will be swamped in early 2027, and the ones who plan with you now will charge less than the ones rescuing you later.
4. Get your income and expenses recording themselves. Invoice from your phone, photograph receipts when you are handed them, and let the software keep the ledger. If keeping records requires a weekly sit-down, the system will fail on your busiest week — which is exactly when it matters.
5. Do a dry run. Before your first real quarter, get one month of records to your accountant and ask "could you file from this?" Fix the gaps while they are free to fix.

Where Larzo fits — and where it does not

Larzo keeps the records. It does not file to HMRC — and any quoting app that tells you it makes you "MTD compliant" on its own is overselling.

What Larzo does: every invoice you send is a dated digital income record. Snap a receipt and it reads the vendor, amount and VAT. Each month your accountant gets a clean set — income, expenses, VAT totals, what is outstanding. When your quarterly update is due, the records it is built from already exist, and the filing is your accountant's five minutes rather than your lost weekend.

The next quarterly deadline for the £50k+ group is 7 November. For everyone else, the clock to April 2027 is running — quietly, the way this one did.

For the full explainer on who is in and when, read Making Tax Digital for tradespeople, or the detail on our Making Tax Digital page. If you would rather just start keeping the records properly, try Larzo free →

This is general information, not tax advice. Check your own position on GOV.UK or with your accountant.