Making Tax Digital: how can a practice win new clients?

A tax deadline does not send clients to every accountant equally. The first group of Making Tax Digital for Income Tax users, sole traders and landlords with qualifying income over £50,000, was due to start on 6 April 2026, and GOV.UK sets the next lines at £30,000 for April 2027 and £20,000 for April 2028. Each line creates a different group of people, starting at a different time, with a different amount of notice. A UK practice that treats them as one wave will either turn up late or promise more than it can deliver.

The pages read for this piece do not say how many of those people will look for a new accountant, and nothing here guesses. What the public record does give a practice is dates, and dates are enough to plan a response. The sections below set out the dates as GOV.UK stated them on 4 November 2026, show why the deadlines make capacity the real limit, and give a worksheet for finding the number.

Who has to start, and from when

The lines are drawn on qualifying income, and each one starts a new group on 6 April. GOV.UK's eligibility guidance ties each start date to income in an earlier tax year. It applies to sole traders and landlords who are registered for Self Assessment and receive self-employment or property income, or both.

Because the income is measured in an earlier year, a practice can already see which of its own clients fall into the April 2027 group. Its sole-trader and landlord clients are known to it, along with their figures. That makes the existing client list the first audience, and our article on whether referrals are enough to grow a practice shows the arithmetic for what that list can and cannot supply.

Why the deadlines make capacity the limit

Every quarterly update falls due on one of four dates, so a practice's capacity is set by the fortnight before each, not by the year. GOV.UK's guidance on quarterly updates gives 7 August, 7 November, 7 February and 7 May, whether a client uses the standard periods or calendar periods. The next, for the period 6 April to 5 October, falls due on 7 November 2026.

Four deadlines shared by every client means the work arrives together. Ten new clients do not spread across twelve months. They all need their update checked in the same two weeks, and that is where a practice either copes or does not.

A worksheet for the fortnight before a deadline

Two assumptions give a ceiling: the hours the practice can spare, and the hours one update takes. Every figure below is invented to show the method. Suppose a ten-person practice can spare 24 hours in the fortnight before a deadline, once existing work is done, and assumes two hours to prepare, review and submit one client's quarterly update.

Line E is the one to act on. A shortfall can be closed by raising line A with more staff or deferred work, or by lowering line B with tidier client records. It can also be closed by signing fewer clients, which is often the sound answer. The right number is the lowest one the practice can serve well, because an update that misses its deadline is the practice's problem, not the client's.

Re-measure line A each time the practice signs a batch. Ten clients signed now and ten more before April cannot both use the same 24 hours. The first ten take ten of the twelve places in every fortnight from then on, so the second ten find two left and a shortfall of eight. Re-running the worksheet after each batch shows the squeeze before a deadline does.

What each group needs to hear

The question differs by income line, so one page should answer each group separately. A client over £50,000 should already have started, and GOV.UK's agent guidance says a client who has not can still sign up. For that group the useful sentence is whether the practice will take a late starter and from which update. A client over £30,000 has until 6 April 2027, and wants to know what to do before then, which is a question about records and software rather than about the next deadline.

A client near £20,000 has the longest notice and the least reason to act today. Writing to that group now spends capacity on people who cannot yet start, and a practice that answers them first may crowd out the ones whose date has already passed. Partnership clients get a holding line only, saying the practice will write when GOV.UK sets a date.

Count your own list before looking outside it

Start with the practice's own sole-trader and landlord clients, because that list already shows who sits on which side of each line. Mark each one by qualifying income, by whether the practice already files for them, and by whether they are signed up. GOV.UK's guidance for agents says clients over £50,000 should have started from 6 April 2026 and can still sign up if they have not.

The same guidance says existing Self Assessment authorisations are recognised, and that adding them to an agent services account does not sign the client up, so each must be signed up individually. It also warns that the agent services account is different from the HMRC online services for agents account. For a UK practice this is a task for the practice itself, and no agency can do it for you. The page adds that from September 2026 HMRC will start signing up required clients who have not signed up themselves.

What a practice page can say

State dates, the number of clients you can take and what you need from them, and make no promise about what HMRC will do. A page that says "we handle everything" gives a sole trader nothing to check. A page that says "as at 4 November 2026, we are taking twelve new quarterly-update clients before the 7 February deadline, and we need records ten days earlier" can be tested. The twelve and the ten days there are examples, and the practice should put its own.

Keep the dated sentence short and put the source beside it. Where a threshold or date changes, the sentence changes with it, so someone should own the page and check it against GOV.UK each quarter.

Where an agency helps and where it does not

An agency can build the page and measure the enquiries it produces, and it cannot decide how many clients the practice can take. That decision comes from line C of the worksheet. To measure enquiries an agency will want to see parts of the practice's systems, and our article on whether an agency should have access to your practice systems separates what it needs from what it should not see. The steps from enquiry to introduction are set out on our how it works page, and what we look at for firms like yours is on the accountancy practices page.

When not to hire an agency yet

Wait until the practice has fixed the number of new clients it can serve and has counted its own list. Without line C, an agency can only be briefed to generate enquiries, and a UK practice that cannot serve them has bought disappointment for the people who write in. Wait too if the target is partnerships, since GOV.UK gave no date for them and any campaign would be built on a guess. Revisit when the timeline is published.