Making Tax Digital will only add an extra layer of bureaucracy for landlords

Part of the problem with MTD has been the lack of basic information about what an MTD submission contains. Bridging software for spreadsheets wasn’t really mentioned until quite recently so really it’s been a choice of standard software aimed at any business or landlord specific software consisting of lots of property management stuff with the promise of the accounting bit being MTD ready at some point.
It’s been difficult to see what a system does before signing up for a trial. It takes hours to submit enough data during the trial to discover if that software will actually be suitable for your specific portfolio. Does it deal with multiple owners? Can it accurately record the percentage of each property someone owns to at least 2 decimal places (for example 33.33%)? Can it cope with the situation where one owner has paid off part of their share of the mortgage?
How responsive is the customer service desk? How good are the online instructions? Do you have to pay extra for training to use it?
How many different products do you need to try before you find one that’s right for you? How many hours is it going to take inputting the data and learning their system?
Will your accountant engage with whichever system you choose? Or are they going to be as obstructive as possible?
I’ve tried at least 5 different systems over the last 2 years.
The original version of Landlord Vision was my first attempt. It took 6 months and a lot of swearing to become reasonably OK with it.
Then I tried Lendlord which would probably be OK if you started it early enough in the tax year. I didn’t and found it very slow to reconcile every historic transaction manually.
Then Landlord Vision brought out a completely.new version so I switched to that. What they didn’t mention was that it was very much a work in progress in the early days. Many hours were wasted trying to make it do stuff it wasn’t able to do for a few more weeks. It theoretically offers a lot and their customer help team are excellent but it isn’t quite right yet and it is seriously expensive. I’m paying over £800 a year and then having to manually adjust the mortgage split and remind my accountant the figures don’t reflect the ownership split accurately. My accountant could log in to my LV account and get every shred of information she wants but she just won’t engage with it at all.
As my accountant loves Xero I gave that a go briefly. The instructions were dismal compared to LV. My accountant offered training sessions at £150 for 1.5 hours. I have no idea how many of those sessions you would need to become competent with Xero. That could make Xero staggeringly expensive and it doesn’t seem to do a fraction of the stuff a landlord specific software does.
As there have recently been various articles about how we are facing costs of UP TO £480 for MTD I thought I’d try and find something that fitted within that figure and have recently started a trial with Hammock. So far it’s looking good. They do an onboarding Zoom session and you can have a 30 minute one to one session. It probably only took 4 or 5 hours to input enough data for it to work. The bit I really like is it recognises and reconciles regular transactions automatically and sends an email most days showing the previous days transactions. Any that haven’t automatically reconciled can be dealt with easily.
Of course my accountant doesn’t like Hammock. I don’t understand why an accountant wouldn’t fully support any software that ensures a clients accounts are presented in a professional, user friendly way. There doesn’t seem to be an acknowledgement that her workload is so much less than when we used to turn up with a handwritten ledger and boxes full of receipts and bank statements.

Reply to the comment left by Jo Westlake at 23/06/2025 – 13:31To be fair to accountants (I am one, as well as a tax adviser), it would be very difficult for them to get excited about using a product that they do not routinely use.
They would need to get familiar with it, which could take several hours – who pays? They would need to have their own log in, so if they are accused of changing anything they can prove it wasn’t them, have enough faith in the security of the product to be willing to use it (what if it contained Trojan software, etc?) and so on. We can use any software, but is it cost effective/safe to do so?

Reply to the comment left by Ryan Stevens at 23/06/2025 – 16:05
If software is on the HMRC list of MTD approved software I think we all have to take a leap of faith and assume it hasn’t got a Trojan.
While learning to use it will take a landlord who didn’t do computer studies at school or train to be an accountant many, many hours it should take an accountant a couple of minutes to find the reports they need on it.
It’s the landlord who needs to spend vast amounts of time setting the system up, learning how to do stuff they have never done before. For an accountant it’s beautifully presented accounts (whichever system is used).

Reply to the comment left by Jo Westlake at 23/06/2025 – 17:18
YOU can assume, but accountants cannot afford to take risks with security, which could affect all our other clients. We would probably accept a widely used program, but I imagine ‘MTD approved’ probably means precisely that – it has nothing to do whether it has been checked for security issues, just that it meets parameters for MTD filing.

It is also unreasonable to think that it will take ‘a couple of minutes’. We will have to find out how to access using our own credentials, sign in, find out how the program works, check whether banks are reconciled, review the available reports, check how it deals with joint tenancies, partnerships, etc., check whether it can export to our software, or whether it is manual input, etc. Software can comprise of many permutations of sidebars, tabs, reports, etc, and navigating them all cannot be done ‘in a couple of minutes’. Every member of staff involved will also need to have some sort of familiarity, so would need to spend a bit of time, and possibly register as a user.

As for ‘For an accountant it’s beautifully presented accounts (whichever system is used).’, as an accountant with over 40 years experience, I can pretty much guarantee that – unless the taxpayer is a well trained bookkeeper, it is very likely to be a beautifully presented pile of sh*t!

Reply to the comment left by Ryan Stevens at 23/06/2025 – 17:46
So presumably the key to it is to find an accountant who is willing to use whichever software works best for you.

Some of them even provide Hammock to their landlord clients apparently. I haven’t found one locally yet but I guess in this day and age of Zoom and virtual everything that doesn’t really matter as much as it would a few years ago.

Reply to the comment left by Gromit at 23/06/2025 – 11:44
But what you pay is estimated on the previous years results and the actual amount owed is determined when you complete your tax return and lodge it with the Revenue.

Reply to the comment left by Ryan Stevens at 23/06/2025 – 16:05
As a recently retired tax consultant I totally agree. I shall wait until I HAVE to do the quarterly digital returns, so by then hopefully some of the inevitable wrinkles will be ironed out of what systen I choose to use. There are meant to be two or three free systems available; how good they’ll be is another matter!

MTD doesn’t affect any landlord operating as a LTD company, it also doesn’t affect partnerships at the moment. So I am alright Jack, and by the time it does affect me I will have sold the properties in my partnership.