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MTD Quarterly Update Builder

Turn the income and expense spreadsheet you already keep into the figures a Making Tax Digital quarterly update asks for. It maps your own category names onto the standard self-employment or property headings, cuts the tax year into its four quarterly periods - standard or calendar - and gives the cumulative year-to-date total alongside the standalone quarter, with every unmatched row listed by name. It produces the figures; filing them needs software HMRC has recognised. Runs in your browser.

Privacy

Your file never leaves your device. It is read and converted by your own browser, so nothing is uploaded, queued or logged — which is what makes this safe for a client’s books.

Tips

  • Keep your own category names. The mapping is by name and by the words inside it, so "Motor expenses - fuel" finds car, van and travel on its own. What it cannot place goes into a bucket called NOT CATEGORISED and is listed row by row, with the category you actually wrote.
  • A quarterly update carries the cumulative year-to-date figure, not the quarter on its own. Both columns are here side by side: send the one your software asks for, and use the other to see what the quarter itself actually did.
  • Negative amounts work the way you would want. A refund on an expense row reduces that expense; a credit note on an income row reduces turnover. Nothing is turned into its absolute value behind your back.
  • One run covers one business. A sole trader who also lets a flat runs it twice - once with the self-employment categories, once with the property ones - because they are two businesses with two sets of quarterly updates.
  • Rows dated outside the tax year are not counted and not hidden: they are listed so you can see whether they belong in the year before or the year after.
  • The category sets and all four period dates sit in one clearly-marked block at the top of the engine file, labelled 2026-09-20. They were not verified against a live gov.uk page, and the points least certain are printed with your results.
  • This produces the figures. It cannot send them. Filing a quarterly update needs software HMRC has recognised, and nothing on this site is that.

Frequently asked questions

Can this file my quarterly update?

No, and it will not pretend otherwise. A quarterly update has to go through software HMRC has recognised, connected to your HMRC account. This produces the figures that software needs and hands them to you as a workbook and a CSV. You still type or import them into the package you file with. Check gov.uk's list of compatible software for what will actually send them.

Cumulative or standalone - which figure do I send?

The update is understood to carry the cumulative year-to-date total, so Q2 shows Q1 plus Q2 and Q4 equals the whole year. Both columns are produced because packages differ and because the standalone quarter is the number that tells you anything about the business. If your software asks for the quarter alone, that column is there.

What happens to a category it cannot match?

It goes into a bucket named NOT CATEGORISED, which is kept out of both the income and the expense totals, shown on screen, and written to its own sheet with the date, the description, the amount and the words you actually used. It is never dropped into "other", because "other" is a real HMRC box and putting a guess in it is how a wrong figure gets filed.

Which categories does it use?

The commonly used self-employment headings for a trade, and the property headings for a letting - the wording a person recognises from the paper pages. Overseas property uses the same headings as UK property here, which the constant block says plainly; the foreign pages have extra boxes this does not model. Every package words them a little differently, so match them up before you file.

Standard or calendar quarters?

Standard periods end 5 July, 5 October, 5 January and 5 April. Calendar periods end 30 June, 30 September, 31 December and 31 March, and you have to elect for them in your software. The deadlines are the same either way: 7 August, 7 November, 7 February and 7 May. If you pick calendar quarters, anything dated 1 to 5 April is counted into Q4 and flagged, because the tax year runs to 5 April.

Is my spreadsheet uploaded?

No. It is read, split and totalled by your own browser, and the workbook is written there too. Your turnover, your customers and your costs never leave the device.

Sources, and when this was last checked

The rules, rates and thresholds this tool applies were last checked on . They change — usually at a Budget or a notification, sometimes between one. Anything you are going to rely on, check against the source.

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