FileThat vs Powered Now for Making Tax Digital

FileThat

FileThat has no subscription. Keeping digital records is free, and you buy a credit for each new quarterly update or VAT return with figures in it, at £3.99, £4.99 or £5.99 depending on your qualifying income across all your businesses. The first 500 individuals to connect to HMRC keep £3.99 for good, and until FileThat has figures to work out your band you pay the lowest price, so the price you end up paying may be higher than the cheapest one shown. We show each band as a monthly equivalent of four quarterly updates for one business. We leave out the £3.99 band from our prices because people who must use MTD have qualifying income over £50,000 now and over £30,000 from April 2027, so the bands that apply to them start at £4.99. Each trade, your UK property and any foreign property are separate businesses with their own quarterly updates, so a landlord who is also self-employed pays twice, although FileThat caps an individual's spending at £50 in a tax year, with £55 the most charged. The annual submission, final declaration and amendments are free. The 4 free credits on sign-up cover the first year of quarterly updates for one business, and FileThat's pricing page says this is why HMRC's software finder lists it with a free version. After that first year there is no lasting free plan for filing, so we do not count it as a free tier. FileThat says all your UK lets are kept apart under nicknames and filed as one property business, and that it does not split figures between joint owners, so each owner files their own share. It says a UK holiday let is filed as part of the ordinary property business now that the furnished holiday lettings rules have ended. Bank transactions come from a CSV statement you upload, as FileThat deliberately does not use Open Banking, so we do not count that as a bank feed. An accountant can sign up as an agent and file for you, and FileThat also files from a spreadsheet template if you prefer. It is a website that works in a phone's browser, and we did not find mobile apps. None of the pages we read says whether VAT is added to FileThat's own prices. We checked this on 25 October 2026.

Powered Now

Powered Now's MTD page describes handling the quarterly submissions to HMRC, but we did not find a way to send the final declaration from Powered Now, and when we looked at HMRC's software list on 25 October 2026 it still showed the year-end return as intended rather than available. So we name each plan as quarterly updates only. The pricing page says MTD for Income Tax is built into every plan, including Business. HMRC's list shows UK property income as available for Powered Now, but its own pages describe trade work only and say nothing about rental income records, so we mark the plans as unsuitable when property income is in the picture until Powered Now's pages say otherwise. The app works on PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad and Android. Receipt scanning comes with Premium only. We did not find a bank feed, mileage tracking, accountant access or anything about furnished holiday lets; the Xero and QuickBooks integrations on Professional and Premium pass figures to an accountant's own software. We checked this on 25 October 2026.