Your First MTD Quarterly Update Is Due 7 August. Here’s the 45-Minute Checklist.

If you're a sole trader who billed more than £50,000 in 2024/25, your first Making Tax Digital quarterly update — covering 6 April to 5 July 2026 — is due by 7 August 2026. Not the tax. Not the return. An update, filed digitally, from software.

Most of the panic around MTD comes from not knowing how small the actual task is if your records are in order — and how miserable it is if they're not. Here's the checklist.

First: confirm you're actually in scope

The test is qualifying income: gross self-employment turnover plus gross property income, before expenses, from your 2024/25 return. Over £50,000 and you were mandated from 6 April 2026. Over £30,000, you join in April 2027; over £20,000, April 2028.

Two traps for trade businesses. It's turnover, not profit — a subbie who invoiced £58k and cleared £30k after materials and the van is in scope. And CIS deductions don't reduce it — the test uses your gross figure before the contractor's 20% came off.

Thirty seconds with our free MTD checker settles it, with the key dates for your diary.

The 45-minute checklist

1. Get MTD-compatible software connected (15 min). Your quarterly updates must go through software that talks to HMRC's MTD API — Xero, QuickBooks, FreeAgent and the other majors all do. If your accountant files for you, confirm they've signed you up to MTD ITSA; being registered for Self Assessment isn't the same thing.

2. Check the quarter's income is all in (15 min). Every invoice you issued between 6 April and 5 July needs to be in the software. If your invoicing already happens digitally, this is a scroll-through. If it happens in a Word template and a folder called "Invoices 2026ish", this is where the weekend goes.

3. Check the quarter's expenses are captured (10 min). Materials, fuel, insurance, sub-payments. Bank-feed matching gets most of it; the merchant cash receipts in the van door are the usual gap.

4. File the update (5 min). The update is a summary of income and expense totals for the quarter — no adjustments, no accounting judgement, no tax payment. Software compiles it; you (or your accountant) press send.

Then it repeats: 7 November, 7 February, 7 May, and a final declaration by 31 January 2028 where the actual tax gets settled, CIS deductions reconciled, and accountant brains applied.

The penalty maths

Miss an update and you collect a penalty point. Four points (on quarterly filing) triggers a £200 fine, and further misses while at the threshold are £200 each. Points expire only after a sustained clean streak. One missed quarter is survivable; a habit is £800 a year of pure waste.

The real fix isn't August — it's the other 89 days

Every horror story about MTD is really a story about records that live on paper until a deadline forces them into a laptop. Quarterly filing simply makes that reckoning four times as frequent.

The businesses that find MTD boring — the correct emotion — are the ones whose invoices, payments, and job costs are digital the day they happen. Field Forge does exactly that for trade businesses: every quote, invoice, and cost recorded against the job as you work, synced to Xero or QuickBooks, so the quarterly update is already sitting there when the 7th comes around.

One thing you can do right now

Open your calendar and put in all four dates — 7 August, 7 November, 7 February, 7 May — with a reminder a week before each. Whatever software you land on, the deadline that's in the diary is the one that doesn't cost £200.