MTD software for a mixed client list: choosing when your clients are landlords, sole traders or both

acrenvo.com/guides/mtd-software-for-a-mixed-client-list, last reviewed 21 October 2026

Joanna is fictional. Joanna’s practice looks after landlords with one or two flats, landlords with larger portfolios, sole traders, and a handful of clients who have both a trade and a rental. Some of them keep tidy spreadsheets, some use an accounting product already, and a few still hand over a carrier bag of receipts. With Making Tax Digital (MTD) for Income Tax reaching more of them each year, Joanna wants a sensible way to decide what each client should use without starting from scratch every time. This guide sets out one way to do that, using GOV.UK’s own checks.

Start from GOV.UK’s checks, client by client

GOV.UK’s list of what the software must do is short, and each point is a question to ask about every client. The software product or products that you choose will need to:

• support all your income sources for Making Tax Digital for Income Tax
• let you make your submissions to HMRC — to send quarterly updates and submit your tax return
• allow you to report all your other income sources to complete your tax return
• work with your accounting period (standard tax year, calendar update periods or neither)

Read across a practice, those points sort clients into groups more than they sort products, so it helps to take them one at a time.

Income sources

The first check is that the software must support all your income sources for Making Tax Digital for Income Tax. HMRC’s software finder asks about those sources as self-employment, UK property, foreign property. So a landlord with only UK property, a sole trader and a client with both are different questions, and a client with property abroad adds another. It helps to note each client’s income sources before looking at any product, and to think about the next year as well. You should check if your software will support that income source in the future.

A product does not have to cover everything for a client with mixed income. GOV.UK says you can choose to use more than one software product, but you can only use one product for each separate submission that you need to make to HMRC. If you use more than one product, you’ll need to make sure they can work together to meet all your Making Tax Digital for Income Tax requirements.

Submissions and the rest of the return

The software must also make the submissions themselves, the quarterly updates and the tax return, and allow you to report all your other income sources to complete your tax return. That second point is easy to overlook for clients with other income. You do not need to create digital records for other income sources, but you must report them on your tax return using your software. This may include income such as from pensions, a share of profit from a partnership as an individual partner, savings or dividends.

Update periods

The last check is that the software can work with your accounting period (standard tax year, calendar update periods or neither). If some of Joanna’s clients use calendar update periods and others the standard tax year, every product the practice supports needs to handle the ones they use.

Working with other agents

GOV.UK also suggests checking whether the software allows multiple agents if you have more than one. That matters whenever Joanna shares a client with another bookkeeper or accountant, because GOV.UK says that if multiple agents are involved in the same business, you must make sure one combined update to HMRC is sent for each update period and submitted for the tax return after any adjustments.

Using Acrenvo across a client list

Once a client’s needs are clear, the software selector narrows the products we compare to the ones that fit that setup, without an account or an email address. Joanna can run it once for each kind of client rather than for every person. The comparison of MTD software then shows plans and prices side by side, with the date we checked each one.

For a client who is not sure whether MTD applies yet, the MTD threshold calculator is a quick first check. HMRC’s own software finder lists every product it has recognised, as the guide to MTD software for agents explains.

Questions about software for a mixed client list

You may also find this page useful: When a letting agent collects your rent: MTD records and who sends the update.