Income Tax MTD: A checklist for practice

You may already be doing more work between deadlines than ever before.

The risk is that it remains invisible, so it never goes into your payments.

With Income Tax MTD, many practices will need to review records regularly, identify problems early, and handle corrections throughout the year, not just at submission time.

If you’re still planning MTD as a “quarterly delivery”, this checklist will help you identify the additional review, governance, and client management work that’s often behind it, so you can price it correctly.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

Who is this checklist

This checklist is designed for accounting and bookkeeping procedures:

• support clients with MTD for VAT and expect to support unincorporated clients with MTD for Income Tax
• they do more revision and correction work between deadlines
• they want prices that reflect the time and commitment involved

1. Work cadence

Is your work still driven by a deadline, or is it already over month to month?

Questions to ask:

• Do you review client records monthly, not just at the end of the quarter?
• Is the mid-quarter supervision task clearly assigned?
• Do you have a defined procedure for incomplete records before moving windows?
• Do you treat spreadsheets or integration software clients as separate, and priced in additional management time?
• Can you estimate the time to review each client without deadlines?

If most of the answers are “no”, your workflow is still deadline driven.

2. Client behavior controls

If the activity takes place throughout the year, the behavior of the client has a direct cost.

Questions to ask:

• Do engagement letters specify deadlines for data submission?
• Are late or incomplete records linked to price effects?
• Are you segmenting clients by track record quality?
• Is the cleanliness of the record tracked or reviewed on an ongoing basis?
• Are clients legally informed of their data obligations under the MTD?

If behavior is not managed, the price will absorb the difference.

3. Limitations of liability

If problems are not detected early, they can progress.

Questions to ask:

• Is the debt clearly listed if the data is incomplete?
• Are review obligations defined between the firm and the client?
• Is there clarity on what happens when the data arrives after being sent?
• If the client changes hands internally, is the offer in writing so that the obligation remains clear?
• Do you have a written process for revisions and revisions?

If responsibility is not held, exposure accumulates silently and becomes difficult to manage.

4. Visibility of power

The invisible hours are the margin’s danger.

Questions to ask:

• Can you measure the difference in update time across the same client?
• Have you ever estimated how many hours an old MTD can be billed for?
• Are junior and senior review levels clearly defined?
• Can you identify the clients who are creating uneven work?
• Have you modeled the dose below the full MTD release?

If you can’t measure exposure, you can’t price it.

5. Alignment of values

The price you pay has changed.

Questions to ask:

• Are rates linked to workload variability?
• Are you using retainers instead of bangs?
• Is the price revision due to a change in behavior?
• Do the proposals refer to an ongoing commitment rather than a submission?
• Does your payment system protect the margin under imperfect client behavior?

If the price takes perfect behavior, the risk is with you.

• If your posts match in sections 1–3your practice still works in the episode model.

• If they meet in sections 4–5your model has changed, but the economics have not.

Either way, your starting point is the same: the amount of work you do, not just the physical work.

You may have already changed the way you work because of MTD.

The real question is whether your price reflects the additional review, tracking, and responsibility that now lies behind each shipment.

For an in-depth explanation of the pricing models and partnership structures associated with this change, see our pricing guide.