Making Tax Digital help?

hairylairy

I have a very small business of less than 100 clients of which just five will be affected by MTD for VAT filing from April 2019. All clients I have are sole traders or partnerships, none are Ltd. At the moment these five bring their paper invoices & receipts to me each quarter. I complete spreadsheets then file their VAT Return using the HMRC facility.
The only other software I use is Keytime's Personal Tax and Moneysoft.
At the moment I'm at a loss as to how this is going to work for me next year and would welcome any ideas.

TreadStone

Do you have any plans to adopt a cloud based system to replace your spreadsheets ?

If yes, you still have plenty of time to trial the various systems out there.

If not, then the only option available seems to be to wait until the bridging software becomes available.

hairylairy

Hi there,I don't have plans yet to use a cloud system, but may have to go that route. Any recommendations?
You mention bridging software, is this something HMRC will be making available?

TreadStone

We use Sage Business Cloud (was Sage One) as our primary.

There are numerous alternatives - Xero, Quickbooks, Clearbooks, Quickfile, Capium, Freeagent, Kashflow etc

As far as I'm aware, HMRC won't be supplying any software, bridging or otherwise.

burg

There are various ways to deal with MTD. The most logical though is adopting cloud based bookkeeping software such as those mentioned above.

As a practice we have taken the view of adopting Xero and moving EVERYONE (VAT registered or not) over to it before 1 April 2019. We may well lose some clients who don't want to be early adopters but we are fine with this. We have developed and perfected methods of working and these involve using Xero.