MTD ITSA phased introduction
Making Tax Digital for Income Tax is being introduced in phases:

• April 2026 – mandatory for individuals with qualifying income over £50,000
• April 2027 – extended to those earning over £30,000
• April 2028 – extended to those earning over £20,000

Qualifying income is based on combined gross income before expenses.

MTD ITSA periods
Unlike MTD VAT which is for quarterly or monthly periods, each ITSA Return you submit must include your totalled figures from the Tax Year Start to your chosen Period End.
Every ITSA Return you submit effectively overwrites your previous ITSA Returns in that year.

You could do an ITSA Return every day if you wished, but practically, most people are going to submit 4 Returns at Quarterly intervals in a year in a similar way to MTD VAT.

Tax Calculations
Each time you submit an ITSA Return, we ask HMRC for an estimation of your likely TAX amount. You can view this on the 'Return Complete' page or at any time later by using the 'Tax Calc' button once you are logged into GOV.UK.

Our User Guide
The trickiest bit of the submission is linking your spreadsheet figures to the fields in our bridging sheet.
For images of the process and more details on the linking process, please see our

User Guide

The sheet is split into 4 sections:
1) Basic Details
2) Income
3) Consolidated Expenses - from April 2025 and turnover less than £90,000
4) Detailed Expenses - from April 2025 and turnover more than £90,000

You should only ever link your expense figures into section 3 OR section 4, not both.
As of April 2025 you may do a 3 box return using section 3 if your total income is less than £90,000.

Basic Details

If you login with your National Insurance Number and select one of the 'Start Return' buttons, these details will be pre-filled for you.
If you download one of our macro-enabled sheets, you will need to enter these details manually

• Name : The company trading name. This is used to link to the correct business obligation and is not sent to HMRC.
• NINO : Your National Insurance Number. This must match the GOV.UK login credentials when you are asked to login.
• Period Start : dd/mm/yyyy. Usually the first day of the tax year, but can be the period start of a quarterly obligation, depending on your settings.
• Period End : dd/mm/yyyy. Usually the last day of a quarterly obligation, depending on your settings, but can be any date up to today.
• E-Mail Address : The email address you want your return confirmation and receipt sending to. After completing a return you can also send to other addresses too.

Income

• Turnover : the period total turnover from your self-employment business.
• Other : the period total of any other business income.
• Tax Taken Off Trading Income : If you have had any tax taken off by a contractor (NOT CIS) enter the total here. You will be able to see any CIS payments that have been made by your contractors by checking your Tax Calculations after logging in to our website ITSA page.

Consolidated Expenses

• Expenses : the period total of all allowable business expenses.

Detailed Expenses

The expenses section has 2 columns. The first column is for your total expenses in that category, the second column is for the part of the total that is allowable as an expense to this company.
eg. If you pay £180 per year for your mobile phone and use it equally for work and personally, you might enter £180 in column 1 and £90 in column 2.

• Cost Of Goods : stock bought for sale or use in the business
• Payments To Subcontractors :
• Wages And Staff Costs :
• Car and Van Travel Expenses :
• Premises Running Costs :
• Maintenance Costs :
• Admin Costs :
• Business Entertainment Costs :
• Advertising Costs :
• Interest On Bank and Other Loans :
• Finance Charges :
• Irrecoverable Debts :
• Professional Fees :
• Depreciation :
• Other Expenses :

The sheet is split into 5 sections:
1) Basic Details
2) Income
3) General Expenses
4) Consolidated Expenses - from April 2025 and turnover less than £90,000
5) Detailed Expenses - from April 2025 and turnover more than £90,000

You should only ever link your expense figures into section 4 OR section 5, not both.
As of April 2025 you should only use section 4, Consolidated Expenses, if your total income is less than £90,000.

Basic Details

If you login with your National Insurance Number and select one of the 'Start Return' buttons, these details will be pre-filled for you.
If you download one of our macro-enabled sheets, you will need to enter these details manually

• Name : The company trading name. This is used to link to the correct business obligation and is not sent to HMRC.
• NINO : Your National Insurance Number. This must match the GOV.UK login credentials when you are asked to login.
• Period Start : dd/mm/yyyy. Usually the first day of the tax year, but can be the period start of a quarterly obligation, depending on your settings.
• Period End : dd/mm/yyyy. Usually the last day of a quarterly obligation, depending on your settings, but can be any date up to today.
• E-Mail Address : The email address you want your return confirmation and receipt sending to. After completing a return you can also send to other addresses too.

Income

• Premiums Of Lease Grant :
• Reverse Premiums :
• Period Amount :
• Tax Deducted :
• Other Income :
• Rent A Room Rents Received :

General Expenses

These can be used together with both Consolidated and Detailed Expenses.

• Residential Financial Costs :
• Residential Financial Costs Carried Forward :
• Rent A Room Amount Claimed :

Consolidated Expenses

• Consolidated Expenses : the period total of all allowable business expenses.

Detailed Expenses

• Premises Running Costs :
• Repairs And Maintenance :
• Financial Costs :
• Professional Fees :
• Cost Of Services :
• Other :
• Travel Costs :

The spreadsheet is split into 5 sections on mutliple sheets:
1) Basic Details
2) Income
3) General Expenses
4) Consolidated Expenses - from April 2025 and turnover less than £90,000
5) Detailed Expenses - from April 2025 and turnover more than £90,000

You should only ever link your expense figures into section 4 OR section 5, not both.
As of April 2025 you should only use section 4, Consolidated Expenses, if your total income is less than £90,000.

Basic Details

This secion is on the first sheet.
If you login with your National Insurance Number and select one of the 'Start Return' buttons, these details will be pre-filled for you.
If you download one of our macro-enabled sheets, you will need to enter these details manually

• Name : The company trading name. This is used to link to the correct business obligation and is not sent to HMRC.
• NINO : Your National Insurance Number. This must match the GOV.UK login credentials when you are asked to login.
• Period Start : dd/mm/yyyy. Usually the first day of the tax year, but can be the period start of a quarterly obligation, depending on your settings.
• Period End : dd/mm/yyyy. Usually the last day of a quarterly obligation, depending on your settings, but can be any date up to today.
• E-Mail Address : The email address you want your return confirmation and receipt sending to. After completing a return you can also send to other addresses too.

Country

• Country Code : The 3 character ISO country code. A good source of these is Wikipedia

Income

• Rent Amount :
• Premiums Of Lease Grant :
• Other Property Income :

Tax Paid

• Foreign Tax Credit Relief :
• Foreign Tax Paid Or Deducted :
• Special Withholding Tax Or UK Tax Paid :

General Expenses

These can be used together with both Consolidated and Detailed Expenses.

• Residential Financial Costs :
• Residential Financial Costs Carried Forward :
• Rent A Room Amount Claimed :

Consolidated Expenses

• Consolidated Expenses : the period total of all allowable business expenses.

Detailed Expenses

• Premises Running Costs :
• Repairs And Maintenance :
• Financial Costs :
• Professional Fees :
• Cost Of Services :
• Other :

On the 'ITSA' page of our website, you can login with your Nation Insurance Number and then start a new return for any open obligation.

The first step of the return is to download one of our spreadsheets, then link your ITSA figures from your account spreadsheet to ours as explained in our User Guide.

Once you are ready to submit your return:
1. Save our spreadsheet.
2. Open our Uploads page by clicking here.
3. Drag our spreadsheet into the upload box, or click the box to select the speadsheet file.

You can use the notes below to fix the problem
OR
Avoid macro issues by UPLOADING our spreadsheet.
Please see our FAQ (above) titled "How does the NEW Upload option work?"

No response from the "File My ITSA Return" button is always one of three things.
1) You have macros disabled.
They need to be enabled for our buttons to work. To fix, save your spreadsheet (as a .xlsm file) and when you re-open it, click the 'enable editing' button and then click the 'enable macros' or 'enable active content' button (both are usually shown just below the toolbar). Please note that saving our spreadsheet as .xls or .xlsx will stop all of our buttons from working.
2) Your excel is in 'design mode'.
if this is true then clicking the button should show a border or resize blobs around the button. To fix, go to the 'developer' tab and click on the design mode icon to switch it off.
3) You have saved our spreadsheet as a .xls or .xlsx file.
If you save our spreadsheet as anything other than a macro enabled .xlsm file, Excel will remove the macros behind the buttons that are needed to make our software work correctly. The only fix is to download another spreadsheet from our website.

If you are having problems, then the simplest test of our spreadsheet is to download a new spreadsheet from:
Go to Downloads Page
Open it, enable macros, tick the declare box and Click the 'File My ITSA Return' button.
Your browser should open on our confirm page, complaining about missing data. You can then close the browser tab and start linking your ITSA figures to our spreadsheet.
If your browser does not open, then please Contact Us and we help to resolve the problem.

Yes, HMRC have explicitly said that recording businesses records digitally can be recorded in Excel spreadsheets providing that they are digitally linked. In order for a spreadsheet to be complaint with MTD, the initial input of the data in the first instance can be inputted manually. Any further transfer, recapture or modification of that data must be done using digital links. A digital link in this instance would simply be a formula linking a cell from one sheet to another. The use of copying and pasting, or manually creating a ITSA return is not compliant with MTD ITSA.

Anyone and everyone, originally devised for small businesses that used paper or spreadsheet to manage their accounts, we have farmers, barristers, engineers, tourist attractions even pension companies and software houses.

We are fully recognised by HMRC as a bridging supplier and are listed as CHM ITSA Bridge on the HMRC site directory

Issues at HMRC

 

Our solution comprises 2 distinct elements

• A Spreadsheet (Excel, LibreOffice)
• A web portal which allows you to logon and submit to HMRC in an MTD compliant way

We have 3 business models

• Individual Businesses submitting their own returns (£8.50 + VAT per return) payable by Card or Paypal ) on each submission
• Agents and Bookkeepers submitting on their clients behalf (£1.25 + VAT  per return subject to a minimum £10.00 + VAT per calendar month payable by direct debit )
• Charities, unable to pay by card or paypal (£8.50 + VAT per return) payable by direct debit on the month after each submission

Our bridging software is FREE to download and integrate with any Excel spreadsheet for both MAC and Microsoft. The filing of the ITSA return with HMRC will cost £8.50 + VAT per submission. Payment will be made via a typical online checkout page during the submission process.

The security and privacy of your data is of paramount importance to us, all transmissions from our MTD compliant ITSA system are secure using the latest HTTPS protocols with the highest levels of encryption, we use the HMRC to authenicate all our customers, so we do not store or share any of your private information. Payments are taken via 3rd party payment provider (Braintree). Braintree is a Paypal company and is a PCI level 1 provider , payment may be made via Paypal accounts or using debit or credit card, all payments PCI DSS compliant and we never get to know or hold any of your payment details, your payments are also protected by Paypal buyer guarantee.

The fields that you complete or link through to our bridging sheet are the only figures that are passed to HMRC.

To sign up for Making Tax Digital for Income Tax (MTD ITSA), you need to visit gov.uk by clicking the button below
Our company name is CHM Software Limited and our HMRC Application ID is CHM ITSA BRIDGE

If you signed up and gave HMRC the Application ID of a different MTD ITSA system, it does not matter.
During our ITSA submission process you will be taken to login to GOV.UK and give permission for our software to process your return.

Sign up for MTD ITSA