MTD starts in 5 days. I tested 8 accounting platforms so you don't have to

MTD for Income Tax goes live 6 April 2026. That's Monday.

If you're a sole trader earning £50k+, you need to be keeping digital records and submitting quarterly to HMRC. Starting this week.

I spent the last month going through every MTD-compatible platform to figure out which one is actually worth using. Here's what I found.

The short version

• QuickBooks Self-Employed — easiest for absolute beginners, but expensive (£14/mo) and limited
• FreeAgent — best overall for freelancers, free with NatWest/Starling/Mettle business accounts
• Xero — most powerful, overkill unless you have complex finances (£16/mo)
• Sage Accounting — solid but corporate-feeling, better for limited companies
• Coconut — underrated, specifically designed for sole traders, £9.99/mo
• QuickBooks Simple Start — middle ground, decent app, £10/mo
• Hammock — freelancer-focused, minimal, good design, but still new
• Zoho Books — free tier exists, MTD-compatible, faff to set up

What actually matters for MTD compliance

Not all of these will make you MTD-compliant out of the box. You need:

1. Digital records — income and expenses logged digitally (not screenshots, not paper)
2. MTD-compatible software — must be HMRC-recognised (check the HMRC list)
3. Quarterly submissions — 4 updates per year to HMRC
4. Bank feed — direct import from your bank account

If you're using a spreadsheet, you need a bridging tool like Xero (with spreadsheet upload) or TaxCalc.

The free route

If you bank with NatWest, Ulster Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, Starling, or Mettle — FreeAgent is included free. It's genuinely one of the best platforms and it's £0 if you have the right bank account.

Mettle (by NatWest) is particularly worth looking at — free business account + free FreeAgent, designed for sole traders.

The catch nobody mentions

Software is only step one. You still need to:

• Migrate your existing records into the new system
• Set up your chart of accounts correctly
• Connect your bank feed (takes 2-3 days for some banks)
• Test a dummy submission before the real one
• Know what goes in each quarterly update

People are downloading these apps thinking they're sorted. They're not.

The quarterly deadlines (for a standard April-March tax year) are:

• 5 August 2026
• 5 November 2026
• 5 February 2027
• 5 April 2027 + final declaration

If you miss one, you get penalty points. At 4 points, £200 fine. Keeps stacking.

If you're starting from scratch this weekend

This is doable. But you need to move fast.

The MTD Readiness Toolkit at landolio.com/products/mtd-readiness-toolkit.html has a 30-day setup checklist I wrote specifically for this panic window — software comparison, migration steps, what to submit in your first quarterly update, and the penalty calculator so you know your actual risk.

£14. More useful than 3 hours of Googling.

Or use the free MTD Readiness Checker to figure out where you stand first.

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Landolio makes practical tools and guides for UK freelancers and sole traders.