How to manage 50+ MTD IT clients without expanding your team
How to manage 50+ MTD IT clients without expanding your team? Let's show you how three tools can work together to make MTD IT more manageable.
·4 min read
The first wave of MTD IT (sole traders and landlords with total gross income above £50,000 per annum) looks manageable for most practices. ICAEW’s workflow guidance for MTD IT is that managing 50, 100, or 200 clients simultaneously across four quarterly deadlines every year may prove to be tricky with everything else also to do alongside it.
A practice with 100 MTD-eligible clients is now managing 400 quarterly updates, 100 end of period statements, and 100 final declarations per year, on top of all existing compliance work. If each quarterly update takes 30 minutes to review and submit, that’s 200 hours of quarterly submission work alone before any client communication, record review, or data chasing is accounted for.
This blog is part of our series, Making Tax Digital for Income Tax: Your Complete Practice Guide to Multiple Cohorts, Workflows, and Compliance.
The team alignment problem that most practices underestimate
The practices that struggle at scale are almost always the ones where no single person has a clear view of every client’s current submission status. Which clients have their Q1 records ready? Which haven’t responded to the data request sent two weeks ago? Which ones submitted late last quarter and need a closer look this time? Without a centralised workflow system, answering those questions requires manual checking across multiple systems, and that checking takes time that practices running large MTD IT portfolios don’t have.
What does efficient MTD portfolio management look like at 50+ clients?
Three things separate the practices that manage large MTD portfolios efficiently from those that struggle:
Portfolio-wide visibility: A single dashboard showing every client’s MTD IT status, current quarter progress, outstanding data requests, and upcoming deadlines.
Standardised quarterly workflow: The same sequence of steps for every client, every quarter (data collection, records review, approval, submission) with tasks assigned to the right person and progress tracked automatically.
Client-side data capture that doesn’t require the practice to chase: The biggest time sink in quarterly MTD IT work is waiting for clients to provide records. Practices that give clients a frictionless, app-based way to submit receipts and income data throughout the quarter eliminate the chasing step entirely.
How do BrightManager and BrightBooks by Bright work together for large MTD IT portfolios?
The Bright MTD IT suite is built around exactly this workflow. BrightBooks' document capture tool gives clients a simple app-based way to photograph receipts and log income as they go, feeding data automatically into BrightBooks throughout the quarter rather than in a batch at the deadline.
BrightBooks by Bright makes quarterly updates easy. It holds the digital records for each client and maintains the bookkeeping layer for quarterly updates. When the quarterly update deadline approaches, the records are current rather than requiring reconstruction, which turns submissions into just a review-and-approve exercise.
BrightManager by Bright is the practice layer. The portfolio-wide workflow system tracks every client’s MTD IT submission status, assigns tasks to the right team members, flags what’s outstanding, and gives the practice owner a live view of where each client sits in the quarterly cycle. For a practice managing 80 MTD clients, that means knowing at any moment exactly which clients are ready to submit, which need a chase, and which are at risk of missing the deadline in seconds.
Check out our guide on how to manage large MTD IT client portfolios without having to expand your team here.
Practical steps for practices building their MTD portfolio workflow
Start by segmenting the current MTD-eligible client base by digital readiness. Clients who are already using cloud bookkeeping are the easiest to onboard to the quarterly process. Clients who are still on spreadsheets or paper need a clear migration path before the first quarterly deadline lands.
Build the workflow in the practice management system before the deadline pressure hits. For a detailed look at how to structure the MTD IT submission workflow for different types of client, see our guide on how to build an MTD IT workflow for mixed client practices.
How does the Bright MTD IT suite compare to alternatives for large portfolio management?
BrightManager by Bright is designed for UK practices. BrightBooks and its document capture tool operate as a connected system rather than separate tools that need to be manually synchronised.
BrightManager and BrightBooks by Bright are built to make large MTD portfolios manageable without proportionally expanding headcount. See how they can transform your MTD IT workflow today.
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.
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