FileThat vs Zoho Books (UK) 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.

Zoho Books (UK)

Zoho's pricing page says "Sole traders and landlords can now stay MTD compliant all year with our free plan", and the free plan covers quarterly updates, the final return and the Self Assessment return, with the UK property (SA105) and self-employment (SA103S) pages filled in for you. Zoho's page for landlords says you can track income and expenses for each of one or several UK properties, so we now show multi-property support. That page speaks to a sole owner, and we did not find anything about joint ownership or furnished holiday lets. On the free plan you can add bank accounts and reconcile them, but automatic bank feeds start on Standard. Zoho's page for landlords lists automatic bank feeds in its free plan and still marks the end-of-year return as coming soon. We follow the pricing page, which puts bank feeds on Standard and the final return in the free plan, and HMRC's software list also shows Zoho as ready for the tax return. We leave out Elite and Ultimate, at £99 and £199 a month, because they are aimed at established businesses with advanced needs rather than landlords or sole traders. We checked this on 25 October 2026.