Master MTD Quarterly Updates with BrightBooks

MTD IT means you’re now faced with four times the number of deadlines and client chasing than you had last year.

This blog is part of our series, Making Tax Digital for Accountants: Your Complete MTD IT Compliance Guide.

If you already use BrightTax or BTCSoftware for your final declarations, you might be wondering how to manage this wave of quarterly filing.

The answer is BrightBooks. It serves as your quarterly filing companion by offering multiple ways to get data from clients and submit quarterly updates to HMRC.

Four Pathways to MTD Compliance in BrightBooks

We understand that you manage a mixed portfolio of clients with different tech levels and business needs. With a big change like MTD for ITSA, you want to make sure that no client gets left behind.

You need a solution that adapts to the client, not the other way around. From April, the platforms you use should be able to handle both digital natives and novices.

BrightBooks is built specifically for this. Instead of negotiating with clients over software choices, you can offer them a compliance pathway that suits their current comfort level and technical ability. Let’s briefly touch on each of the four pathways that Bright offers.

1. Full Digital Bookkeeping

• For clients that want real-time visibility into their finances, BrightBooks offers complete, cloud-based digital bookkeeping. They can log in, track their income and expenses, and collaborate with you in real time. Because BrightBooks is fully recognised by HMRC, you can submit quarterly updates directly from the software in just a few clicks.

2. The Bridging Tool for Spreadsheet Users

BrightBooks includes a robust MTD IT Excel bridging tool designed specifically for spreadsheet users. When the quarter ends, they just import their Excel data into BrightBooks. You can review, adjust, and correct the figures before submitting it to HMRC.

This way, you’re still compliant, and your clients can continue working as they always have.

3. Bank-Based Compliance

Some clients might not need complex ledgers or spreadsheets. For example, you could have a few landlord clients that run all their rental income and property expenses through a single bank account.

BrightBooks caters to this with seamless bank-based compliance. You can import bank transactions automatically via secure bank feeds or through simple CSV uploads. The software uses smart rules to automatically categorise regular income and recurring expenses.

This removes hours of manual work and makes quarterly filing effortless for clients with straightforward transaction patterns.

4. Shoebox Clients and AI Capture

Every practice has shoebox clients (clients who drop off a box or bag stuffed with crumpled receipts and invoices). Under MTD rules, if they earn over £50,000, these clients still need to submit quarterly digital updates.

To solve this, we’re introducing BrightCapture, our MTD quarterly filing tool.

This automatically pulls physical receipts and invoices from their phones and sends them off to BrightBooks for quarterly filings. This means those shoebox clients can (finally!) be digitalised and saves you what would typically take hours for MTD for ITSA.

The Perfect Match for BrightTax Users

If your practice uses BrightTax or BTCSoftware for final declarations, BrightBooks is the natural choice for quarterly filing. Using them together creates a perfectly smooth, end-to-end MTD workflow.

You can use BrightBooks to manage the messy reality of quarterly returns. Then, BrightTax pulls all that consolidated data down from HMRC, adds any employment or investment income, and generates a flawless final declaration.

Turn MTD Quarterly Filings into Opportunities

If you try to force clients into just one way of doing things, you’ll create friction that doesn’t have to be there.

You can offer your clients a more flexible approach through using BrightBooks. With it, you keep the spreadsheet enthusiasts happy, automate bank-feed clients, and digitalise your shoebox clients, all from one platform. If you’re looking into how to effectively price your MTD services, check out our blog on How to Price Your MTD Services.

Explore BrightBooks and discover how easy quarterly filing can be when you have the right tools for every client.

This content may have been developed with the assistance of AI tools. Content is reviewed by a member of the Bright team before publication. Guidance on legislation can be obtained from your industry body.