Making Tax Digital – Maximum efficiency option?

Reply to the comment left by John at 09/04/2024 - 16:21I suspect fairwood789 is referring to a Windows program called Quicken by Intuit.  The last standalone PC version published was Quicken XG in 2004 and I am still using it everyday on a Windows 11 laptop.  There are copies for sale today on eBay at £19.99, though I can't vouch for their authenticity. 
I use it to track my BTL income & expenditure on four (was 8) properties as well as my personal accounts & investments.  I'm not aware of a limit on the portfolio size.  New versions have not been released since 2004 and there are no bugs I can recall.
There is an OpenSource 'version' of Quicken called GnuCash.  It is not a straight copy as it has double entry bookkeeping (which Quicken does not).  It is free.  I have trialled GnuCash but not migrated to it as I have a large investment in customised reports that I would need to rebuild.  If I was starting from scratch I would probably use GnuCash.
The information I am interested in is the data format required for MTD, and the cheapest way it can be loaded into HMRC's system.
Martin

Hi John,
Thank you for your reply.
Before answering your question, I looked at the article this morning and realised that I was not the only one who is completely frustrated with all the, over the top, expensive, difficult to learn and set up, accounting or management packages are out there.
I have tried for years to find something better than I use but have failed miserably. I believe most products are most suitable for use by book keepers and accountants who want the minimum information to produce an annual set of figures, so the package is not set up for the landlord to easily interrogate their accounts, giving them what they want from their figures. Also, they want the client to input the information and accept the liability for its correctness, enabling them to log on remotely and run their automated report. All that frightens me to death.
My current system is very easy to use and set up, but without a lot of experience and understanding, most people will do what I did for many, many, years i.e. set it up, manually extract and transfer the individual category totals into Excel, which I spent years trying to change to make neater and more understandable. Now, everything is streamlined and mapped to reflect the HMRC SA100 form and is consistent year after year.
When I read the original post, I started to think, can I monetize my efforts and knowledge to supplement my rental business income, Similarly I spent a fair amount of time trying to build a mathematically complicated calculator to produce freehold reversion figures for when a leaseholder wants to buy their freehold, or when a freeholder wants to sell the freehold to a leaseholder.
The rules are quite clear and the maths quite complicated. Hence, those wanting to know the correct values end up paying surveyors large amounts of money to calculate the values. However, the complications come when one party, or the other, get greedy and use either exaggerated or distorted property values to use in the calculations, along with other variables which can be challenged if the matter goes to a tribunal.
I sold many freehold reversions at a fraction of what they were worth but for the last fifteen years I have made good money because I am able to accurately calculate a value that cannot be challenged, providing we use a sensible approach to the valuations. In fact, I have never failed to achieve my valuations when challenged by a solicitor or surveyor, apart from one occasion where I agreed £500 less than I wanted because the leaseholder had given meet grief over many years and I wanted to get rid of the hassle of collecting her £12.60 every year or having to issue a county court summons.
I have yet to come across a free calculator that gives an accurate result, that always gives the same figures calculated by surveyors, when we both use the identical valuations. However, I have come across surveyors who load or discount values in order to benefit their clients, but they have always climbed down.
I am still giving thought to whether or not I can monetize both sets of knowledge which can save money or make money for the user.
By the way, you don’t have to pay the £19 that I paid, it is now available free. When I finish exploring what value my experience is worth and if I can use it profitably, I will let you know.
BTW it is not the variant of Quicken which I don’t believe I ever tried, although I did disregard a version after looking at it around twenty years ago.
Regards
fairwood789

Sage have a system that will do this but you are looking at at least £50 a month. As probably the majority of landlords only have 1 or 2 properties (and assuming you are outside of London) then with a bit of luck you will just come under the income threshold for reporting. It won't apply to LTD companies.

I've been using Landlord Vision for the last 18 months or so. Initially inputting the data was quite a task, mainly because I wanted to get it to produce the answer for a historic period, but if you were just to start now for 24/25 tax year it should be fairly straight forward.
It seems to do everything I need it to do, including splitting properties in different shares between myself, my wife and our son and if I have a problem there's good help easily available from real people.
Generally inputting data is simple & straightforward and it links to our bank account so ties up cash flow with income & outgo.
Still to prove itself for MTD (the whole reason I went for it) but much easier than pulling together spreadsheets at the end of the tax year!

FreeAgent which is fully supported software (and owned by Royal Bank of Scotland) is FREE if you have an RBS account. There will be a FreeAgent for Landlords (up to 5 properties) that is available and is MTD compliant

Reply to the comment left by Mick Roberts at 09/04/2024 - 05:43
I'm a bit late to this party - shows how far behind I am checking emails....

I run a small VAT registered business and MTD swept up the VAT reporting system some time ago.

My business is slowly winding down over a period of many years - I used to use Quicken Deluxe (purchased about 25 years ago) but over the years have had more and more trouble running it on newer versions of Windows and having more and more difficulty running Windows XP emulators on newer versions of WIndows. So now all my accounts are managed in a single spreadsheet.

With MTD VAT reporting they wanted to remove any potential errors through data entry thereby automating the submission of VAT returns instead of allowing you to manually enter 9 figures in their website. Not being one to want to spend large amounts of money on dedicated software to submit this data for me, I eventually found a free only service that offers a 'bridging mode' of VAT submission, so if your 'software' can produce an CSV file with the correct data then they will submit it to HMRC for you.

My 'software' is Excel. I manually type my 9 numbers into 9 blank cells of a spreadsheet and then upload the CSV file through this free service, instead of typing those 9 numbers into 9 clearly labelled boxes on the HMRC website. The process is now more complicated for me, doesn't cost me anything but has increased the risk of data entry errors compared to the pre-MTD system and has required a third party software provider to kindly offer this free service to me. Go figure.

I guess the land and property version will also allow for the bridging mode, so we should be able to create our CSV files and upload them - just be sure to enter the right numbers in the right blank cells. Good luck!

Reply to the comment left by HouseBuyer at 24/04/2024 - 09:35
Don't bank on it, property assets are sometime a lot more complicated with properties being part owned - hence you have to work out the % of rent and expenses. Note: LTD companies are not affected.