Making Tax Digital is no longer a distant thing that happens to other people. It has already reshaped VAT, and it is coming for income tax self-assessment in stages - pulling more sole traders, landlords and small businesses into digital record-keeping and quarterly updates every year. If that is you, or soon will be, the question is not whether to get MTD software but which - and the honest answer is less exciting than the ads suggest.
There is no single "best" - there is best for you
Anyone who tells you one product is the definitive best MTD solution is selling something. The right choice depends entirely on how you already work. A taxi driver logging trips on a phone, a tradesperson invoicing from a van, and a landlord with three properties have almost nothing in common except the legal obligation - and software built for one of them will feel wrong to the others. The best MTD tool is the one that fits the life you already live, not the one with the longest feature list.
What actually matters in MTD software
The trap to avoid
The common mistake is buying more software than you need because a familiar name recommends its own biggest package. Most people newly caught by MTD have simple affairs and need a simple, cheap, well-designed tool that does the quarterly job and gets out of the way. Paying for a full accounting suite to file a landlord’s quarterly update is like buying a lorry to do the weekly shop. Match the tool to the size of the task.
Our own driver and trade tools were built exactly this way - to feed MTD from the habits people already have, at prices that match the modesty of the job, with a real person behind them when something is not standard. That is the shape we think MTD software should take for the people it newly affects, whoever they end up buying it from.