MTD Free Software

[sniper74]

Hi. We do our accounts on an excel spreadsheet. I know Sage and Quick Books are roughly £12 a month to subscribe to but is there any free software out there so we can link our excel spreadsheet to enable us to submit our VAT figures with having to pay out a monthly fee?

 

[John Hemming]

There are quite a few options for free software (including mine - see signature).

 

[Victoria_V]

Hey there! To be MTD compliant for VAT, you can continue to use excel spreadsheets to keep digital records of your business’s transactions, but excel spreadsheets on their own will not make you MTD compliant, so you could get something called a bridging software which will work as an interface between HMRC’s VAT submission portal for MTD and your spreadsheet.


HMRC has produced a list of software for MTD for VAT. This list also includes bridging software. You should be able to search online to see if any of the bridging software shown on the list is free to use.

https://www.tax.service.gov.uk/making-tax-digital

 

[John44]

I'm just using Easy MTD for a fiver a submission. It's a piece of cake to use whilst HMRC and Great Plains still try to get the interface working,

 

[urstop]

Try https://accountsdesk.co.uk/mtd

 

[Pish_Pash]

I used VitalTax for my last submission (it's an excel add-in, so I just export my VAT data from Quickbooks as a spreadsheet, open in Excel & let VitalTax do the submission)...free for a year, then £12 per annum after that ...I was going to code up my own solution, but frankly it was so slick & so cheap, I can't be bothered to do so now!

 

[locutus]

I used VitalTax for my last submission (it's an excel add-in, so I just export my VAT data from Quickbooks as a spreadsheet, open in Excel & let VitalTax do the submission)...free for a year, then £12 per annum after that ...I was going to code up my own solution, but frankly it was so slick & so cheap, I can't be bothered to do so now!

Sounds really good, if you're a small business.

I actually use Xero for all of my accounting, and payroll, and I need something like Xero to keep track of all my receipts - I get a lot. It's also linked to my till system. It makes my life much easier.

 

[Pish_Pash]

Even for a medium/larger sized business, deploying bridging software (such as Vitaltax etc.) has it's place.....the pain (& potentially...cost) of migrating from legacy accounts software (which hasn't MTD functionality built-in) to Saas acccounts software is significant, so IMHO it's far better just to pay £12 per annum for something like VitalTax etc & be MTD compliant on your existing old accounts software.

 

[mlp1freya]

If you have an old version of Sage and don't want to pay £££ to upgrade, then download AmbitionMTD it links to sage, ridiculously simple, just run VAT as normal then go into Ambition to submit, costs £7.50 plus VAT per return, so £30 for a year vs £162 pmth.
I tried the Avalara spreadsheet but it took days and still wasn't working. This took minutes and saved me a massive headache!!

 

[UK Contractor Accountant]

We use in house VT Transaction+ cash book - £75 + vat per year.
Comes with the Excell MTD bridge as well

 

[Easy MTD VAT]

I'm just using Easy MTD for a fiver a submission. It's a piece of cake to use whilst HMRC and Great Plains still try to get the interface working,

Hi John. I'm glad you're using Easy MTD VAT to submit your returns. The cost of using our software to submit a return can be reduced by simply purchasing in bulk (on our website move the slider to the right in the Buy Submission Tokens section).

You are also likely aware that your first submission is free - i.e. we provide a complimentary submission token when signing up for an Easy MTD VAT account.