As discussed in the Making Tax Digital podcast released on 15 April 2024 now is an excellent time to sign up one or two clients for MTD with HMRC. It is not going away.
It helps the practice understand the MTD quarterly filing process to commence in 2026. The sign up is voluntary.
The primary reasons to sign up are:
help the practice learn how your software works
understand how HMRC's software works
learn how clients respond to the new filing requirements It is appreciated that many clients might be reluctant to join a scheme before they have to. However, any practice with, possibly hundreds of clients, the time to find out how it works is not in April 2026.
It is a shame there is no test client supplied with each Agent Services Account which would allow us to try out the functions on non-live data. Perhaps this could have been supplied to those practices that agree to use the trial.
The reality is clients will have to be moved over to suitable software by the middle of 2025 because you can't change all of them on 6 April 2026. Though many practices have moved clients over already.