A communications problem before a tax problem
Your software will handle the filing. What it will not handle is telling several hundred sole traders and landlords that their tax year has just changed shape — and then chasing them four times a year instead of once.
The three phases
| From | Applies to | What it means for the practice |
|---|---|---|
| April 2026 | Gross self-employment or property income above £50,000 | Your largest sole traders and landlords. Usually a manageable number, and often already engaged. |
| April 2027 | Above £30,000 | The difficult one. A much larger group, many of whom have never used accounting software and do not read letters from HMRC. |
| April 2028 | Above £20,000 | The long tail. Smallest fees, highest handholding cost per client. |
Qualifying income is gross income from self-employment and property before expenses. Employment income, pensions, savings interest and dividends do not count towards the threshold.
What this actually costs a practice
The filing is the small part. The work sits in everything around it:
- Identifying which clients cross each threshold, from data you may not hold in one place
- Explaining the change to people who have filed once a year for twenty years
- Getting them onto software, and supporting them when they cannot use it
- Repricing engagements that were quoted for one annual return
- Chasing records four times a year, from clients who were reluctant once a year
Could you produce, this afternoon, a list of every client who crosses the £30,000 threshold in April 2027? Most practices cannot. That list is the whole job, and everything else follows from it.
How we handle it
Segment the list
We work with you to split your client base by threshold and by readiness, so every message afterwards goes to exactly the right group. If your data is not in one place, this is where we start.
A staged explanation, not one email
A sequence that introduces the change, explains what it means for that client specifically, and asks them to act — spread over months, in plain English, from the practice rather than from a system.
Onboarding and software setup
Booking links for setup sessions, reminders for clients who have not yet acted, and a different message for those who have. Nobody gets chased for something they have already done.
Quarterly record chasing, automatically
Each quarter, the record request goes out on schedule to the clients in scope, escalating for the ones who do not respond. This is the part that would otherwise consume your team four times a year, forever.
One thing to get right before you send anything
Most of the clients affected by MTD are sole traders — and under PECR, sole traders are individual subscribers, not businesses. That means consent or the soft opt-in, rather than the business exemption you may be assuming applies.
Genuine service messages about work you are doing for a client are not marketing and are not caught by this. The line matters, and it is worth being on the right side of it before you email four hundred people. Since 5 February 2026 the maximum penalty has been £17.5 million or 4% of turnover.
Every client we onboard gets a plain-English guide to these rules, and we build the consent tracking and segmentation that keeps campaigns on the right side of them.
MTD questions
We have not counted our affected clients yet. Is that a problem?
It is the most common answer we get, and no. Producing that segmentation is the first thing we do together, and it has value regardless of what you do afterwards.
Does Zainush file anything with HMRC?
No. Your filing software does that. We handle everything around it: identifying, explaining, onboarding and chasing.
Can we use this to reprice affected clients?
Yes, and many practices do. The same segmentation that tells you who is affected tells you which engagements were priced for a world that no longer exists.
What if a client refuses to move to software?
That is a conversation for you, not a system. What we can do is make sure you know exactly who those clients are, early, rather than discovering them in the week before a deadline.
Start with the list
We will help you work out who is affected and when. That segmentation is useful to your practice whatever you decide to do next.