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Today, I had a moment to get organised and prepare for the first Making Tax Digital submission due by 7 August 2026. I was already signed up for Making Tax Digital, and the faff was not where I expected.
This article is about what I did and the lessons learned, hopefully to make it easier for others.
For the broader rules, see our existing guides on Making Tax Digital for landlords explained and choosing MTD software for landlords ahead of 2026.
The government's starting point is the GOV.UK sign-up page. It says landlords and sole traders use the online service, need compatible software, and must use the same Government Gateway user ID and password they used for Self Assessment.
The GOV.UK checker explains the thresholds. Over £50,000 of qualifying self-employment and property income in 2024/25 brings you in from 6 April 2026. Over £30,000 in 2025/26 brings you in from 6 April 2027. Over £20,000 in 2026/27 brings you in from 6 April 2028.
I was already registered through Government Gateway, so I expected that part to be painless. Rachel was not yet signed up.
She first went through GOV.UK One Login, including the passport and selfie check on her phone, which worked fine in itself. Then we discovered the MTD Income Tax sign-up still wanted the HMRC/Government Gateway route because it has to use the Self Assessment credentials.
One Login may be where government services are heading, but this bit still depends on the old HMRC account trail. Rachel had to do it again through the Gateway method. Don’t make the same mistake we did.
The second lesson was more irritating.
When connecting to Xero, the authorisation kept failing with a message indicating that my National Insurance number did not match. It was not that. The UK property business had not been added to the HMRC account as an active source of income.
GOV.UK does say you need an active sole trader or property income, and if there is more than one business, you should check each one and add anything missing. As it turned out, that step mattered.
Once I added a UK property business to my HMRC account through Government Gateway, Xero connected without issue.
If it were only me, I could have submitted the MTD figures through Xero with no further action required. The snag is that our properties are jointly owned, and Xero does not seem to split the figures between joint owners as we need it to.
Each of us has to submit our own income and expenses, so bridging software looks like the cleanest route. Furthermore, if, like me, you have other sources of income in addition to UK Property, you'll also need to submit a sole trader MTD submission in addition to the UK Property submission.
I am trying My Tax Digital because it is free and supports a single login for multiple Government submission logins. It has a bridging option that links to a simple spreadsheet. That means I can handle both my own submission login and Rachel’s. It also supports both UK Property and sole trader for situations of multiple sources of income.
The bridging template is basically the familiar SA105 property layout: rents, other property income, tax deducted, lease premiums, rent-a-room amounts, repairs, insurance, ground rents, professional fees, services and wages, travel, other allowable expenses, consolidated expenses, residential finance costs, and unused finance costs brought forward.
Update: since writing this, a family member of a subscriber contacted us about their involvement with a Simplyfy MTD, a free tool providing MTD for landlords, which has been beautifully designed. It only supports UK Property income, though, and doesn't support sole traders.
Because I am me, I have over-engineered the spreadsheet part.
I use Hermes, an AI agent running privately on a dedicated Mac mini: my own automation assistant for repeatable local jobs. I asked it to build an MTD skill that pulls data from Xero, summarises it into MTD and SA105-style categories, splits what needs splitting, and creates two spreadsheets — one for me and one for Rachel — ready for My Tax Digital.
It worked on the first test. After a few personal tweaks to how our particular accounting works, the skill is ready to repeat automatically every quarter on the 12th of the month. That is one week after the last day of the reporting quarter, so there should be time for all entries for that period to be in.
At the moment, it will not automatically publish to HMRC. I will still need to import the generated Excel files into My Tax Digital and hit submit. In time, the submission could probably be automated too, but I am not starting there.
That is overkill for most landlords. If you have a simple spreadsheet, the free template may be enough.
But for anyone technical who already keeps proper records in Xero or another accounting package with an API, and has jointly owned property, it is reassuring to know the awkward bit can be automated.
The annoying part was not the accounting. It was ensuring that the sign-up was done through the Gateway, not OneLogin, and making sure HMRC knew exactly which income sources existed before the software was allowed to access them.
Once set up properly, Making Tax Digital should become a click-to-submit exercise. With a little preparation beforehand, each quarter can be much simpler.
I spoke with my accountant after publishing this, and they had been on Xero training, and they believe there is a way to (a) have more than one registered individual to upload MTD for under a single Xero subscription and (b) create a "fake category" that can take 50% from a designated "real category" in your setup and use that for the uploaded data. I haven't tried this because I have other calculations to complete before submission, as I also look after some of my parents' rent and need to deduct that first; otherwise, it does look like Xero can handle multiple individuals.