Making Tax Digital for Income Tax - Q&A

Last time we briefly talked about making tax digital for income tax. It all kicks in from April 2026. And in today's video, I'm going to go over some of your questions that you've asked in the comments of my last video and also just discuss some of my own personal concerns with the mess that is about to hit small businesses. Hi folks, and welcome back to the small business toolbox. And man, it is popcorn time. This making tax digital for income tax thing, I don't think the government realize what's about to unfold. Just judging by your own comments in my last video, the vast majority of people have never even heard of this. And for a reasonable number of you, it all kicks in from the beginning of the next tax year. But the scary thing is that I don't think a lot of you have realized yet is that whether or not you have to do making tax digital for income tax next year is based on the turnover of the tax year that's just finished. So in other words, the tax year that ended in April 2025. And that's because there's three thresholds that we're going to be looking at here. Anyone with a turnover of over £50,000 in the 2024 to 25 tax year is going to need to do making tax digital for income tax from April 2026. And then that threshold drops to £30,000 for April 2027 and eventually the plan is for it to drop to £20,000 or below. And let me just make this 100% clear. It's based on turnover, not profit. £50,000 turnover for any small business is a tiny amount. If your turnover is £50,000 and you're working on a gross margin of about 50%, then you're barely bringing in minimum wage. Anyway, let's dive right into this. And I think the best way of treating this is to go through your comments and your concerns rather than me kind of dictating things from my perspective. So, let's have a look at some of the things that you've raised. So one of the first things is

does it affect soul traders or is it just fat registered companies? Making tax digital for VAT was rolled out a few years ago. This is all about making tax digital for income tax. So if you currently file an annual self- assessment tax return as a self-employed business owner, a soul trader or a landlord, then this is almost certainly going to affect you. So can we still do

a tax rebate for the self-employed? Well, part of the reason that I've got a lot of issues with the whole making tax digital thing is that there are so many unanswered questions as to how things are going to work, but I suspect tax rebates will work in exactly the same way as before. You're still going to have to do an annual self- assessment tax return. It's just you're also going to have to do four other quarterly returns separate to your self- assessment return. So effectively you're doing five returns a year. Four kind of quarterly snapshots and then one final big tax return in the same way that you do it at the minute. And therefore if you are due a rebate that would be identified in your final end of year tax return I suspect. But then someone else

said it's exactly the same as it's always been. It's just you've got to update HMRC every 4 months and not every year. Well that is fundamentally incorrect. It's not exactly the same as it's always been because up until now you've had 9 months to get your information over to HMRC at the end of the tax year. And there's many reasons why it's 9 months. But one of the major differences now is that you're going from one tax return a year. That's going to change radically because now you're going to be submitting your returns quarterly and who knows what the deadline is going to be. Again, it's another big unknown. I suspect if it's anything like VAT, you'll have a month from the end of the quarter to submit your tax return, but I have no idea. Will this affect landlords? Yes, it will

affect landlords. It will affect anyone who's a self-employed soul trader or a landlord or both. As far as I'm aware, it doesn't affect partnerships yet. Doesn't affect limited companies yet. Although, that's another whole can of worms. So, uh don't think you're safe by just switching everything to a limited company. They're coming for those as

well. Everyone is going to be getting scammed left, right, and center. And yeah, this is a big concern of mine. There's what, five million self-employed people in the UK, and the scammers are going to be all over this. So, just be really, really careful. Never ever click on a link in an email, even if it looks like it's coming from HMRC, always just go to the HMRC website and find that information yourself directly. be very careful clicking links on emails if you don't know where they've come from. And even if it does look like a believable email from HMRC, I think HMRC are pretty good in terms of not putting links in emails because they know it's such an easy way to scam people. But just be really, really careful. The scammers are going to be all over this. I saw this coming a while ago and decided to retire as an accountant. This

is such an unnecessary burden on those with a low turnover. And yes, unfortunately, I'm hearing of this across the board, too. Lots and lots of businesses are going to end up shutting down over this. If people were maybe a few years away from retirement, I suspect there's going to be a lot of people who are just going to bring that forwards because it's just not worth the hassle, especially once we get to like the 30,000 or 20,000 turnover threshold to do five tax returns a year or four quarterly updates and then a final end ofear return. Especially if you're not techsavvy and you're having to pay an accountant to do it. It's just not a cost-effective the your business just is over at that point as far as I'm concerned. I would be much more sympathetic with HMRC if they aligned the threshold of this perhaps with the VAT threshold of £90,000, but that's probably far too sensible. So, I can't see that happening anytime soon. In the meantime, small businesses are just getting hammered once again. It's not good news. Keep your records up to date.

Save for tax. Delegate to your accountant. Get on with business. I don't see why it's a problem or how it's any different except you have to pay more regularly. You are already doing it with VAT. Employers pay it monthly. It wouldn't surprise me if that happened next. The government is broke. So, there's some things in that I agree with and are just fundamentally wrong. Keeping your records up to date on a quarterly basis, yeah, in an ideal world, great. But a lot of businesses simply can't do that. We'll go into that in a bit more detail later on. So, you're going to be going from sending one set of records to your accountant every year to at least four. So, I would expect your accountancy bill to at least quadruple. Now, obviously, that's not necessarily the case if you're using software that can directly feed back to your accountant, but not everyone is capable of using software. So for all of those people, they're going to basically farm everything off for their accountant to do for them, which basically means doing everything the accountant would do on a yearly basis, but quarterly instead. As for you're already doing this with VAT, well, no, you're not. The VAT threshold

is £90,000, and the starting threshold for making tax digital for income tax is £50,000, and eventually that's going to drop down to £20,000 or possibly even lower. And VAT returns were always quarterly. Even before making tax digital for VAT, you still had to submit your VAT returns quartly. So, nothing has really changed on the VAT side. But on the income tax side, man, it's a enormous change to how things have been done in the past. Employers pay it

monthly. I'm assuming you mean employees pay it monthly. And yes, that's true. If you're an employee of a company, you probably pay through PAE, pay as you earn, and you pay your tax on a monthly basis. really that's completely irrelevant because big companies have like admin departments and stuff to sort out all the tax and accounts related things. As an employee you don't have to do that. So I don't really understand the relevance of that. And it also doesn't care for the fact that if you are self-employed you've got payments on account which is way worse than pay as you earn because with payments on account you're paying tax in advance for work that you haven't even done yet. And as for the government is broke uh the

government aren't broke. They have a lot of money. It's just they spend it on stupid things. And at a time where we desperately need small businesses to succeed, the last thing we need to be doing is putting obstacles in the road of that. And that is what this is. This is going to be a massive burden to small businesses. And really, one of three things is going to happen. Either they're going to have to put their prices up, which is going to push inflation up even more, or they'll simply stop trading as they approach the threshold, which is what basically happens with VAT at the moment. more about that later on. Or they'll just shut down completely cuz it's just not worth the hassle anymore. So, the self-employed have to now pay monthly

for software to submit their tax returns. Uh yeah, potentially that is true. So, basically, you're going to have to sign up for the software that is designed to be used with Making Tax Digital. And at the moment, there's not a lot of options out there. There's a selection of paid options and there's a very small selection of free options. With most of the free options, there seems to be some sort of catch like it's only up to a certain number of transactions or there's certain things that you can't do with it. There's also options for bridging software. So, you can still use spreadsheets which is still the best option for many businesses. And if anyone says otherwise, you are forgetting what a simplex daybook is, which is effectively the forerunner of spreadsheets. There is no better solution for a lot of businesses than using a spreadsheet. But what you basically need is for that spreadsheet to be able to talk directly to HMRC because HMRC want to interrogate that spreadsheet directly. And to do that, you need bridging software, which you'll either have to pay for or we'll see what kind of uh free options appear. We don't really know yet, but bearing in mind that it's less than a year now that you've got to kind of get yourself up and running on this software ready for submitting your returns from April 2026. So, uh, good luck with that. But on the subject of software, and this is really one of my biggest grumbles with the whole system, a lot of businesses are run on completely bespoke software. So it might be a bespoke CRM system that also does accounting and all sorts of other things. Maybe that company paid for this software to be developed and it like suits their business down to the ground. It might be for like a firm of florists or a firm of plumbers or a car mechanic or whatever. But if that software was developed several years ago, they're happily using it. It works. It does the job. Perhaps it's not getting updated anymore. Well, guess what folks? that ain't going to be making Tax Digital compliant because unless it's signed off by HMRC and it's on that list of compliant software on the HMRC website, then you're not going to be able to use that anymore. If you use bespoke software, bespoke spreadsheets that don't fit in with the way HMRC now want things done, then you're essentially stuffed. My question

is, what difference this digital tax actually makes? What are the downsides really? Well, as briefly mentioned, you're going to be going from submitting one tax return once a year and having nine months to submit it to submitting five tax returns a year, four of which will presumably be due within a month of the end of that quarter. Also, you're not going to have an interface on the HMRC website where you can submit these figures because HMRC have fobbed off the front-end responsibility from something that they have to do off to the private sector. And it's basically the software that you have to pay for or if you can find some free software that actually works, but it's going to be that software that submits the information to HMRC. You're not going to be able to type these numbers into a box on the HMRC website. So again, that is fundamentally different to the way things work at the moment. Can't see a

problem with it myself. It's just HMRC trying to drag itself into the 21st century. It shouldn't be a problem for honest folks, but it'll make life harder for those screwing the system. So that's a gross generalization there that anyone who finds this hard is obviously screwing the system. Wow. Uh no, there's a lot of people who just aren't particularly IT literate. I personally know plumbers who don't use a mobile phone at all. They still use a landline or like a brick phone to book their jobs. They just don't have time to get into the IT side of things. They don't like smartphones. And on a lot of these sort of jobs, there's no point carrying an expensive phone around because it just gets broken in your pocket. Especially in certain industries in the trades where you're climbing under floorboards or you're involved in demolition work and all that sort of thing. Just because you're techsavvy doesn't mean everyone is techsavvy. This person then goes on to say, "Wealth

inequality now is greater than in Denzian times. What we need more than anything else is a wealth tax. " So there's a lot of people jumping on the wealth tax bandwagon at the moment. And trust me, I don't think I would be affected by any kind of wealth tax. But the really important thing that you need to remember about a wealth tax is that and this is completely irrelevant to the whole topic of this video, but I just want to touch on it just to kind of dispel a couple of myths. A wealth tax would almost certainly be based on asset values of assets that haven't been sold. So, it's basically taking a guess at what assets are worth and then taxing them on whatever they think it's worth with money that they don't necessarily have. So, you would have to sell the assets to have the money to pay the tax. So, you wouldn't own the asset anymore. Does that make sense? Obviously, it doesn't make any sense at all. And what any business of any reasonable size will do is just offshore everything. It's not that hard these days to offshore businesses. I've thought about offshoring my own businesses. It would be relatively easy to do. Probably a bit more hassle than it's worth, but it's certainly doable in the 21st century. It's not as complicated as you think. So, yeah, I don't think a wealth tax would result in any extra money for the UK government. I actually think it would probably make things a lot worse. I agree capitalism's out of control and I'm no fan of people being multi-billionaires, etc., etc. I do agree with all that. I don't think a wealth tax would fix it. But until someone tells me practically exactly how a wealth tax would work, like what the thresholds would be, what happens when you don't physically have the cash to pay the tax on the imaginary value of an asset that hasn't been sold yet, then uh yeah, and what about pensions? Surely pensions are an asset. So, does that mean that all your money that's sitting in your nice, comfortable public sector pension is now going to be subject to a wealth tax? Because I know many people in the public sector that have over a million pounds in their public sector pension or at least to get the kind of returns from a private pension that would equate to what you would get from the public sector pension, you would have to have well in excess of a million pounds in your pension. So would that be affected by a wealth tax? I suspect not. But anyway, I don't fundamentally disagree. Just explain to me how it's going to work. No one has explained that yet. Anyway, I digress. So let's have a look at what happens when you introduce

an arbitrary threshold to something that's going to be an absolute ball. This graph commonly gets referred to as the VAT cliff edge in the UK. We've basically got turnover along the bottom here. Remember turnover is how much the business is bringing in total. It's not profit. It's not how much you're taking home. And basically what we're looking at is how many businesses exist in the UK for each turnover kind of bracket if you like. And I'm only showing £50,000 turnover and above here. The vast majority of small businesses are way below the 50 grand turnover mark. But what you can see here is that the number of businesses slowly decreases and decreases. But then as you approach what used to be the £85,000 VAT threshold, there was an uptick of businesses just trying to push to make as much as they possibly can before they hit that magic £85,000 figure. and then it just drops off a cliff edge. Clearly, they could make more money than that, but no one wants the hassle of VAT registration and doing quarterly VAT returns and everything else that goes alongside being a BAT registered business. It's just more hassle than it's worth for a lot of companies. And when they start to approach the BAT threshold, they literally shut the business down. We'll find in future years once we get the stats through that this has been shifted a little bit forwards to 90 grand because 90 grand is the new VAT threshold in the UK. But you're still going to get this crazy drop where people just stop doing work because they don't want to register for VAT because VAT is a nightmare. So folks, guess what happens when we bring in a 50 grand threshold for making tax digital for income tax, which is going to be way more complicated than quarterly VAT returns. So let's take a look at the reality of what that actually looks like for most businesses. So this line at the bottom here just represents like all the months of the year. Okay? And I'm going to run this over more than one year. You'll see why in a minute. But in terms of the practical reality of what's happening when a business approaches that cliff edge, imagine their VAT quarter starts here. And for argument sake, we'll just say that that's January, but it could be any month. So basically their income over the course of their year. Let's see. So we've got uh quarter 1, quarter two, quarter three, quarter four. they basically get up to their end of year and at that point if they're approaching the BAT threshold which at the minute is 90k then rather than risk getting really close to that threshold what they will probably do is just around this point they'll start just winding things down a bit and they'll just flatline and then they'll get to the start of the next year and they'll start doing the same and it'll repeat like that over and over again and that's literally what we're seeing on that vat cliff edge graph that I just showed you is that instead of this happening, they're basically just shutting the business down at this stage. That could happen earlier. You know, they might just bring it down slowly like that. They might decide at this point, let's just have 3 months off and we'll just like shut it down at that point. It's going to vary by business, but you get the general idea. But the thing that everyone seems to be missing is that with the VAT cliff edge, everyone has different VAT quarters and you can change it. So you might have another business where their VAT quarter starts here. So their graph is going to look kind of a bit like that. And then you're going to get another business maybe their VA quarter starts kind of here. So their graph's going to probably go a bit like that. And over time it's just going to kind of balance out over the year. So you're not getting one set time where every single business is going to close down. But as you are aware with income tax self assessment, the tax year runs from April to April. So, the tax year starts on April the 6th and it finishes on April the 5th. And up this side, let's just put our arbitrary thresholds. So, we know that the main threshold that kicks in first is 50K. We're then going to have a 30K threshold and eventually we're 20k threshold. Well, what do you think is going to happen when we approach that 50k threshold? So, businesses are going to be making money, and then as soon as they get close to that, they're going to shut down, aren't they? In exactly the same way that they currently do with VAT. We have proof of that. Why do you think it would be any different for income tax self- assessment, especially since making tax digital for income tax is going to be much more ownorous than making tax digital for VAT? Now, what happens past this point is anyone's guess. As I say, they might just shut the business down and have 3 months off. I would imagine a lot of businesses will just switch to cash and do things off the books. But either way, you are going to start to see this cliff edge and eventually that will happen for 30k and it will happen for 20k because no one wants to do extra work that they don't have to do. They will find a way around it. I will promise you that. But the big issue here is that the tax year always runs from April to April. And don't get me started on that one. In fact, I'll talk about that a little bit more later on because that's going to be incredibly problematic as well. But I think we're going to end up seeing a situation where we end up with a self-employment shutdown period from January to March when everyone's approaching these arbitrary thresholds and they no longer want to trade anymore or as I say the switch to cash or they end up using this as kind of an admin time or whatever. But we're going to end up with this situation where self-employed businesses just shut down for the last quarter of the income tax year. In other words, from January to March, you're going to find it really hard to find any kind of self-employed trade. You might even find like small businesses such as cafes and florists and things might have to shut down for a period of time. I don't know what's going to happen. It's not like VAT where it's spread out over the course of the year because everyone's fat quarters all start at different times. With income tax, everyone's tax year runs from April to April. Now, a solution to this would be to let the tax year run from any period in the same way that it does for companies. So, a company tax year could run from January to January or from June to June, whatever. But I can't see that happening anytime soon. And if that was going to happen, it would have been sensible to sort that out before bringing in Mating Tax Digital because that's going to change everything again. But this situation here, I guarantee this is going to happen and it's going to cause absolute mayhem for the final quarter of the year. And what about reconciliation?

We seem to be just kind of brushing that under the carpet now. I'll include a link down in the description all about reconciliation, but it's basically the process of going through all of your transactions that you've logged in whatever bit of software that you use and comparing it to your bank statement and making sure that everything tallies up. And I would never advise sending anything to HMRC based on unreconciled accounts. In every single business that I've ever been part of that is VAT registered, we've always done quarterly reconciliation to make sure that what we're sending to HMRC is correct. And the thing is, when you're making over £90,000 a year, I mean, yeah, it's a ball, but it's not like the end of the world. But if you're only making 20 grand a year and you're now going to have to do quarterly reconciliation of your accounts, and normally you would probably get your accountant to do that. again, more money to your accountant to get all of that sorted out. But if your turnover is just 20 grand, which means that you're going to be bringing in well below minimum wage and you're now going to have to do quarterly reconciliation of your accounts. Oh my word, that is horrific. As I say, unless we're just brushing reconciliation under the carpet now and we're just not going to bother. And I know you can do a lot of that sort of stuff automatically from software that's linked to your bank account and stuff like that, but with a 20 grand business, are you going to be set up to do that? I would imagine the vast majority of people aren't. Anyway, let's

talk about the date problem. As you are well aware, the UK tax year starts on April the 6th and ends on the following April the 5th. So we are running the tax year over the actual like calendar year if that makes sense. Now I've written an article explaining why the UK tax year starts on the 6th of April. It's utterly insane. It dates back to like when the Virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus Christ and all this sort of stuff. I'll include a link down in the description. I mean, we're talking about modernizing the tax system and we're still basing the tax year on that. Oh my word. Anyway, let's just kind of brush over that one, but yes, for a modern country, we start our tax year on the 6th of April. You might find the same in some Commonwealth countries, but the vast majority of the planet actually runs from January to December, which makes much more sense obviously. But no, we're stuck with this 6th of April thing. So, if you now need to do quarterly returns, that means that you're going to have to do your next return based on the 6th of July and then the next one based on the 6th of October and then your final one which will end on the 5th of April again. So this will be your quarter 1 return. two three return. And this will be a quarter 4 return. So again, this is radically different to how things work for VAT because VAT runs from the beginning of the month. But with income tax self assessment, you're going to have to run from the 6th to the 6th. So, if you are running spreadsheets or whatever to work out your quarterly profits and all that sort of thing, all your formulas are going to be based on really weird date calculations. You're not going to work things out just for the current month because you're going to have to start it on the 5th. So, this first quarter is going to include the first five days of um July. So you're going to have the first to the 5th of July are going to be in this first quarter. So it's going to cover kind of April, May, June, and July in one quarter. That's insane. And how accountancy software is going to work with all of this, I have no idea. Now, what they've also talked about is allowing you to change the start of the year to the first. So you would at least run your quarters from the first of each month. But again, how does that work when you come to submit your final end ofear tax return, which has to start from the 6th? It's just absolutely crazy. Why didn't they use this as an opportunity to either change the tax year to start from the 1st of January or allow a flexible start of year in the same way that it works for a limited company. So, you could start it at any time. on the 1st of March and run your quarters from there, similar to how VAT works as well. And then that would make it really easy to align your income tax quarters with your VAT quarters. Because bear in mind on top of this, if you're VAT registered, your VAT quarters might start at a completely different time. So for example, if your VAT quarter starts in June, you're going to have your VAT quarter, which covers June, July, and August for quarter 1, but your quarter 1 income tax will be April, May, June, and a little bit of July. And then your quarter 2 VAT will end up being September, October, November. But your quarter 2 income tax will be this plus a little bit of October. So can you see why this is going to get unbelievably confusing? It's just bizarre. Why didn't we modernize the tax year first to align with the rest of the planet and then bring in making tax digital? Wouldn't that be the logical way of doing things? Instead, software companies are having to write software and bridging software, and people are going to have to like create spreadsheets to deal with this absolute insanity. And it's just even more work. It's like no thought has been put into this whatsoever. Anyway, this video is getting very long, and I haven't even got through like a tenth of your questions. Please do keep the comments coming on this video because it is so interesting to learn all of your experiences of how this could potentially impact your business. But one final thing that I want to touch on is why the government is doing this or

at least why I think the government is doing this. There are a few kind of conspiracy theories going around. And don't get me wrong, I dread to think what could be done with AI once they've managed to gather all of this information from so many different businesses over the years. It's all starting to get quite dystopian because there's no way on earth with HMRC's current staffing issues that they're going to have time to go through all of this data that they're now going to be gathering. So, the only reason I can kind of think they're doing it is maybe for future analysis and for AI use because otherwise it's just gathering data for the sake of it. But here's a more likely explanation, especially in the short term. The government's IT systems are ancient and nothing talks to each other properly at all. It's only a few years ago that they stopped telling people what to do if they had a 28. 8K modem when they were completing their tax return. and they've only just managed to get PAE data feeding directly into your self- assessment. So I think the government are panicking the need to sort out the horrendous mess of legacy systems and as part of this it's kind of a quick fix. It basically means that all they need to do on the HMRC side is provide all of the databases and things that they need to log everything but all of the front-end development is as I say fobbed off to the private sector to sort out. HMRC just need to make a few APIs that external companies can connect through which in itself by the way if it's not managed properly is a potentially massive security risk but uh I'm not going to get into that in this video but I'm sure people who are more familiar with APIs and programming and how databases link to each other all across the world. I am sure you will be able to enlighten us in the comments below. It certainly raises a few red flags for me. So look, this is the UK National Nuclear Laboratory. Oh, they've got one of them cookie warnings. Let's have a look. Oh, analytic cookies on by default. Naughty, naughty. And marketing cookies. What? As the UK's leading civil national laboratory for nuclear fishision, we will be working more closely with government to drive forward the nation's nuclear ambitions. About us. The UK NNL is the UK's leading civil national laboratory for nuclear fish. Delivering nuclear science to benefit society. What we do? We drive innovation in nuclear science, ensuring the UK has the capabilities it needs. Well, here's the government's contract finder. And this particular posting was put out on the 20th of February 25 for the UK National Nuclear Laboratory. And basically, they're looking for a Forran programmer. Now, FORRAN, yeah, it's quite old, but um it's still going kind of, but uh let's just have a look at what they're after. And bear in mind, this is for the National Nuclear Laboratory, and they're saying an independent programmer may be required to review software source code written in FORRAN77. The reviewer will be expected to be up to date with the best software development practices as well as the latest security issues with FORN77. I know it's wiki, but this is all about FORRAN. So, how old is FORN77? Let's have a quick look. Uh, yeah, that would appear to be from 1978. So, in terms of the whole you will own nothing and be happy thing, believe me, I get it. But I think you're grossly overestimating what the public sector are capable of doing. Trust me, I know a lot of people who work in government and things are just a disjointed mess. Nothing talks to each other properly at all. But this does neatly lead onto another concern that I kind of forgot to record earlier and that is cloud

software because basically everyone's going to be forced onto cloud software to make this work. I think I don't know how many onremise solutions are actually available to do the whole making tax digital for income tax thing but I would imagine most of it is like a cloud orientated approach where effectively you're uploading all of your accounting data onto someone else's computers and that means you need to be very careful about vendor lockin and this is a topic that I've discussed before on this channel and I've written about in depth and I have personal experience of because I used to manage cloud infrastructure so I know exactly what vendors are trying to do with the cloud and it's not all about user satisfaction believe me cloud services are the biggest cash cow going for modern IT conglomerates trust me on that one so on the basis that you need to keep your accounting records for at least 5 years for auditing purposes you need to think about how do you get access to that data from three or four years ago if you've uploaded it to the cloud and you no longer have any digital records of that other than the stuff that's on someone else's computers because that's what the cloud is. So be very careful. Make sure there's a way of extracting all your data and make sure they don't remove that ability to extract data in the future. Because if you ever decide you want to change from one provider to a different provider, you need to be able to extract all of the historic data. Because otherwise, let's say for example, for two years you end up using one particular cloud service provider to upload all your accounting data onto their solution and after a couple of years you realize that it's crap. So you decide to move to someone else and then in three or four years time you get audited and HMRC ask to see data from four years ago. Well, how are you going to get access to that data unless you're still subscribed to the first service provider that you still think is crap? So, you're going to have to make sure that you've exported all of the data from that previous provider and either store it on a hard drive somewhere or on the cloud somewhere on a different provider or upload it to the new provider and the data from the old provider might not even be compatible with the way the new provider operates. So, this is all stuff that you're going to have to take into account. There's a lot of big business decisions to make here and it's important you get them right from square one and it's certainly not something I would rush into. So on that basis, yeah, you're going to have to pull your finger out. I'm sorry to say. So there you go folks. Do add to my

concerns down in the comments below. Perhaps you think I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, but as I say, not everyone is IT savvy. And just because you might have a desk job where you have time to keep on top of the admin on a daily basis, most businesses don't operate like that at all. But hey, let's see where things go. I might make a future video about how I would fix this if I was in charge because there's so many things I would do differently. I mean, off the top of my head, I would change the financial year to make it totally flexible. Instead of starting from the 6th of April, which is just still blows my mind, I would also change the registration threshold to align with VAT and then I would encompass the two so that your BAT and income tax were all done through a single quarterly return. But who am I? I'm just some random bloke on the internet blathering away about the trials and tribulations of self-employment and running a small business in the UK. One thing that's worth mentioning, by the way, a couple of people mentioned about paying tax

quarterly now and all that sort of thing. As far as I'm aware, they're not going to take any money off your quarterly or not yet anyway, although I would imagine that is on the cards. So, don't panic too much on that front. I think you're still going to be paying your tax on a yearly basis or twice a year if you're doing payments on account. But yeah, watch this space. I would imagine the eventual end goal is to get money rolling into HMRC on a much more regular basis. Anyway folks, for now, do hit subscribe if you're new to the channel because there's loads more to come on this particular subject and loads of other slightly more like enjoyable topics as well. Good luck on your small business journey and we shall see you next time. Tatty. Bye.