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In episode 3 of our MTD masterclass, John Toon takes us through building sustainable MTD workflows, service models, and potential pitfalls to avoid.
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Making Tax Digital for Income Tax arrives on 6th April 2026, and for accounting firms managing landlord clients, the shift to quarterly submissions represents the biggest operational challenge.
In Episode 3 of our MTD Masterclass series with John Toon, Chartered Accountant and Technology Advisor at Beever and Struthers, we get practical about what quarterly submissions look like in practice, who should handle them, and how to build workflows that are sustainable for your firm.
Listen to Episode 3 | Building Flexible Workflows for MTD Quarterly Submissions available on YouTube → and Spotify →
One of the first strategic decisions firms face is deceptively simple: who should make the quarterly submissions—the firm or the client?
It's a question that's prompted mixed responses from accountants. Some firms are reluctant to take on what feels like additional bookkeeping work. Others simply don't trust clients not to slip in non-claimable expenses like dental work or other personal spending.
John's answer? It depends entirely on your firm's strategy and what your clients are willing to engage with.
"I'm going to completely sit on the fence here," John admits. "I think it depends on the strategy from a firm's point of view. How are they going to package this up? And are they (clients) going to be willing to buy this as a service from you?"
Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, John anticipates most firms will end up offering three distinct levels of service.
Related: MTD Quarterly Updates and Final Declarations Explained
In this model, the firm handles all bookkeeping and quarterly submissions for the client. It's the highest-touch, highest-value service option and will also, necessarily, be the most expensive.
"We'll end up with a level of service where we do everything for that client," John explains. "So we're going to be doing the bookkeeping, we're going to be doing those submissions. And then when we get to the end of the year, we'll roll into the end-of-year submission, which in reality is no different from what we’ve been doing before."
The benefit? Speed to delivery should be quicker at year-end since the work's already been done quarterly. The challenge? You need the capacity from a people perspective and the right technology in place.
There's also a critical educational component: "You need to educate your clients to give you information at the right times because we've all been through that pain of getting information on the 31st of January in the past and we don't want to turn that into four lots of getting the information on the 5th of July, 5th of October, etc."
This middle ground acknowledges that some clients won't want to pay for comprehensive bookkeeping services but still want professional oversight before submitting.
"I think there will be a little bit of a middle ground with this as well, clients who won’t want to pay for what's going to be potentially quite a high value service in terms of the bookkeeping side but will still want us to validate and verify the submission before they press the big red button, as it were," John notes.
It's not a new concept. As John points out, many firms already offer this service level with VAT: "That's no different to kind of what a lot of firms will have experienced with VAT in the past. We've had that kind of level of service there in the past for a lot of firms."
The final tier is where the firm stays out of quarterly submissions entirely, only stepping in at year-end to validate and complete the final declaration.
"The final option will be that we don't go anywhere near the quarterly submissions," John explains. "We may well monitor them from a tax software point of view, because most tax software will be able to sort of see those submissions as they come through."
This creates an interesting scenario: "It will end up being an end-of-year tax compliance service. The additional work that we'll have to do is to validate those previous quarterly submissions and figure out where the differences lie or where the mistakes have occurred."
Related: Making Tax Digital for Income Tax: The Complete Guide for Landlords
Even if you're offering a hands-off service where clients handle their own quarterly submissions, John sees a valuable opportunity for firms to maintain oversight and become more proactive in their services and advice.
"We will be able to see all the submissions as they're made," John notes. "So, there is an opportunity for accounting firms to monitor those submissions, check to see if anyone's late, and prevent penalties."
It's a service differentiator and a client relationship opportunity.
"This is an opportunity to sell a service to a client as well, an opportunity to pick up the phone and be relatively proactive and take you five minutes and cost you nothing," John suggests.
For landlord clients specifically, quarterly submissions create an early warning system for portfolio issues.
Because landlord income and expenses tend to be consistent quarter to quarter (barring voids or property issues), dramatic fluctuations signal something's wrong.
"If you're seeing a portfolio that fluctuates quarter to quarter, for example, this is a bit of a red flag. Something's going awry. And again, it’s an opportunity for us as accountants to be proactive and say, hey, do you know what? I saw your submission for Q1 that looked really reliable, but then we saw the following one, and something's gone completely crazy."
That five-minute phone call could uncover a client who's fallen behind on bookkeeping, discovered a property issue, or needs support with another service you offer.
Related: Making Tax Digital Penalties: What Landlords Need to Know
Throughout the conversation, John repeatedly emphasises the importance of flexible workflows over rigid, one-size-fits-all processes.
"I think in terms of the service offering, you've obviously got to be flexible because it's not going to be a one-size-fits-all," John states. "It's going to be really unusual that you'll be able to sell a fully managed bookkeeping and submission service to every landlord client.
“And equally, I think it's incredibly unlikely that you're going to be able to push the responsibility for submission onto all of your clients because some of them just will not want to do that."
The challenge here is determining which service package is going to be best for which clients, which of them are going to be willing to pay more so they can do less, and which are going to be most price sensitive but still need a little help staying compliant.
As a firm, you need to start modelling this out early. For example, if X% of clients are going to need a full bookkeeping service, how many more staff are you going to need to hire? And how much are you going to need to charge?
A few things to consider ahead of time include:
Related: Best MTD Software for Landlords in 2025
While general accounting software works well for sole traders and contractors who send invoices and manage straightforward business expenses, landlord accounting presents unique complexities that generic solutions struggle to handle.
Landlords need to track their income and expenses on a property-by-property basis and assign ownership percentages, for example.
"One bit that makes this much more complicated for landlords is mixed ownership and mixed portfolios where you could have, say, a husband and wife owning two properties 50-50, but then the wife also owns another property herself," John explains.
Or even more complex scenarios: "You could have a family that owns a whole bunch of different properties and one of them owns 5% of one property, but 25% of another property."
These precise ownership percentages need to be recorded and reported to HMRC in each quarterly submission, and if you’re having to manually calculate this every quarter, “From an accounting point of view, in a standard sort of bookkeeping system this is almost impossible to manage.”
Of course, specialist software creates a new problem for clients who have multiple income sources. If a landlord is also a sole trader and you use separate software for each activity, you end up doing two sets of MTD submissions—an obviously inefficient approach.
"In an ideal world, then you'd be looking for some kind of element of integration between those two solutions, right, so that you can just do one set of submissions," John suggests.
MTD for Income Tax introduces something entirely new to the UK tax system: the concept of dual agents.
"With MTD for ITSA, which we haven't really had at all previously, whether it's been on the MTD regime or normal tax regime, is this concept of having dual agents," John explains. "One agent, just doing an end-of-year submission, and another agent managing the bookkeeping."
This creates a tripartite arrangement between accountant, bookkeeper, and client that requires careful workflow design.
"From a software point of view, you've got to be able to accommodate that," John notes. “And this will have different workflows, different levels of data, and granularity of information that you need to look at."
This level of sophisticated access management simply doesn't exist in general accounting systems.
John identifies three common pitfalls firms encounter when implementing MTD workflows:
1. Unreliable Automations
Don't assume automations will work perfectly from day one. John recalls OCR technology sending invoices "always to the wrong place" until someone adjusted the rules. It can be tempting to set and forget, but even small errors here can quickly compound.
The fix: Monitor and refine automations during the initial implementation phase before trusting them completely.
2. Data Extraction Errors
Tools pulling data from letting agent statements can systematically miss recurring payments or mishandle net vs. gross figures.
"You're just relying on an extraction tool to get that information from a statement, but it doesn't get it right," John warns. "Then you get to the end of the year and go, oh, hey, we missed a recurring payment of £100 a month."
The fix: Validate extracted data regularly, especially in the first few quarters.
3. No Testing Before Go-Live
"The devil in all of this is usually in the detail," John notes. "It's really just a matter of becoming familiar with that and doing a little bit of training and testing before you kind of go live with clients."
The fix: Pilot systems with a small client group first. Don't flip the switch on April 6th and hope for the best.
Based on John's insights, here's how to approach workflow development systematically:
1. Assess your client base. Before finalising your service offering, get a realistic sense of how your landlord clients will split across the three tiers. Survey them, have conversations, gauge their comfort level with technology, and their willingness to pay for different service levels.
Download the free MTD checklist and send it to your clients or have them take our MTD-readiness quiz.
2. Define your service packages clearly. Don't leave ambiguity about what each tier includes. Be explicit about:
3. Build your software stack strategically. You'll need multiple solutions, but be thoughtful about which ones. Consider:
4. Implement monitoring systems from day one. Even for hands-off clients, build dashboard monitoring into your processes. Set up alerts for late submissions, flagging inconsistent quarterly data, and establishing regular review points.
5. Plan for piloting and testing. Don't wait until April 6th to discover workflow problems. Test your processes with a small group of clients first, identify pain points, adjust, and then scale.
6. Build in flexibility. As John emphasises repeatedly, rigid processes will break. Your workflows need to accommodate different service levels, different client capabilities, and evolving needs as everyone gets more comfortable with the system.
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Landlord Studio is purpose-built for MTD compliance with property portfolios, offering:
Book a demo with Landlord Studio to see how we can streamline your quarterly submission workflows and reduce the administrative burden on your firm through the MTD transition.
John Toon (FCA, FMAAT) is one of the UK’s leading voices in digital transformation and advisory accounting. As the Technology Advisory Lead at Beever & Struthers, John helps accounting firms and their clients embrace innovation, improve efficiency, and stay ahead of regulatory change — including Making Tax Digital (MTD).
🔗 Connect with John on LinkedIn or listen to his podcast Digitools in Accrual World.
