Preparation is key: Review your Making Tax Digital workflow
Published:
In April 2026, Making Tax Digital (MTD) for self-assessment will become mandatory in stages for specific landlords and sole traders. This marks a fundamental shift from annual submissions to near-continuous reporting. It’s therefore important for organisations that help clients with their bookkeeping and tax returns to keep records of all important correspondence and agreements.
What is Making Tax Digital?
In a nutshell, the new legislation requires sole traders and landlords earning over £50,000 annually to begin quarterly digital reporting of their finances to HMRC. This is a departure from the traditional annual reporting required by past tax returns, so tax agents and accountancy firms will need to adapt how they maintain their records.
It’s also worth noting that this isn’t the be-all end-all of this legislation’s implementation. MTD will be brought in in stages, depending on how much a landlord or sole trader earns.
This phased approach will decrease the threshold for those needing to follow these new rules, year by year, i.e. April 2027 for those earning £30,000 per annum and April 2028 for those earning £20,000 per annum.
Under MTD, good record-keeping moves from being best practice to a baseline expectation.
Who does MTD affect?
As these thresholds fall, MTD moves from a specialist concern to one that affects all firms. What begins with higher earners quickly becomes the default way tax reporting operates, increasing both the volume and speed of work handled by agents. Documents such as agent authorisation, engagement letters, quarterly reporting approvals and correction and resubmission authorisations will be a major indicator of consent between you and your client before HMRC even sees a report.
This drastic shift has the potential to expose weaknesses in processes, particularly when approvals, client confirmations, or record-keeping rely on manual steps or informal tracking. And with quarterly reporting, there is a small window to get it right; workflows either function well every cycle or they fail under pressure.
Reporting of this frequency also means that manual work, disconnected tools and deferred actions will just not work. To stay compliant at scale, teams need workflows that are consistent, repeatable, resilient under scrutiny and always in progress.
Having time-stamped, tamper-proof workflows means contracts, approvals, and records are captured correctly the first time, every time, so reporting becomes a by-product of the overall process and not a sudden chaotic search for evidence.
How important is security and compliance in the wake of MTD?
Every time you send quarterly updates to HMRC on behalf of your clients, they need confidence that you can quickly show clear evidence of your and their digital records and agreements. Especially with quarterly reporting, compliance won’t be something you prove once and forget about. It needs to hold up every time you submit. Each submission reinforces the expectation that records are accurate, up to date, and handled securely from the start.
Compliance works best when it’s part of how work gets done, not an extra task added on afterwards. By standardising how documents are sent, signed, and stored, there will be fewer errors, fewer gaps in approvals, and clearer, defensible records. The result is lower risk, less admin, and functioning compliance that runs invisibly in the background.
When sensitive financial data is involved, even small gaps or inconsistencies in how agreements are captured can create unnecessary risk. Building secure, auditable steps directly into your day-to-day workflows keeps compliance consistent rather than reactive, giving both firms and their clients confidence that every interaction can stand up to scrutiny, not just at year-end but periodically throughout the year.
As always, security and compliance remain front of mind for tax agencies and the wider financial sector. The personal data involved in financial agreements, such as National Insurance numbers, bank details, and VAT numbers, is highly sensitive and must be handled with care at every stage.
Make Signable part of your MTD ready workflow.
What might be a manageable adjustment for a single filer will become significantly more complex at scale. The best way to prepare for the admin logistics that come with MTD is to use a comprehensive eSignature tool so that you, your clients, and any regulatory bodies are all on the same page during an audit.
Signable offers a scalable, easy way to record digital signatures, so financial professionals can maintain a tamper-proof paper trail.
Signable offers an easy-to-use API that integrates with the systems and tools you already use. Our API is compatible with Zapier, giving you and your team a more efficient workflow with up to 5000+ integrations.
Tax agents and accountancy firms are responsible for managing compliance across multiple clients, each with different levels of readiness, documentation, and processes. MTD calls into question both your accounting software and the way you run and control the data that flows through it safely. With up-to-date security accreditations and AES signatures, Signable can provide the perfect platform for highly secure, MTD-ready workflows.
Just as importantly, Signable brings consistency to processes that are often fragmented across teams and clients. By standardising how approvals and agreements are issued, signed, and stored, firms can reduce variability in how compliance is handled day to day. When agreements are captured digitally and securely from the beginning, reporting becomes easier to stand behind. Try Signable today with a 14-day free trial to see how you can keep your document workflow watertight for MTD.
Peter Amey
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