Work out whether Making Tax Digital catches you, then turn the bank statement and the receipts into figures a quarterly update will take.
23 tools · 17 free with no account · 6 free to try with one
Letting is the trade where the tax threshold is measured on the money passing through rather than the money you keep. Making Tax Digital for Income Tax counts gross rent — before the mortgage interest, before the agent’s commission, before the boiler — and adds it to the turnover of any self-employment you also have. Two flats and a bit of freelance work can put somebody inside a band while they are certain they are nowhere near one.
So the first job is arithmetic on that single number, and the second is keeping records that can answer it four times a year instead of once. The tools here do both: work out where you stand and from which April, then map your own expense headings onto the standard property headings and cut the year into its quarters. Thresholds and dates sit in one marked block with the date they were last checked and a link to the gov.uk page that settles it, and nothing about a tenant is sent anywhere by the tools that run in your browser.
Are you in, and from when?
The gross-income question, before anything else is worth doing.
No. Employment income, pensions, dividends, savings interest and capital gains are all outside qualifying income. What counts is gross rent from every property business plus turnover from every trade, added together before a single expense is taken off. That is the definition people get wrong, and it is why the checker asks for gross figures and says so on every field.
Which expense headings does the quarterly update use?
The standard property headings — the wording you would recognise from the paper pages — and your own category names are mapped onto them, so you do not have to rename anything in the spreadsheet you already keep. Overseas property uses the same headings as UK property here, which is a simplification the page states rather than hides.
Can I file the update from here?
Not yet, and we will not pretend otherwise. These work out the figures and show you every row behind each one, which is the part that takes the evening. Filing has to go through software HMRC has recognised — a vendor registration, their tests, and fraud prevention headers on every call. That is an approval, not a feature, and we are working through it.
