Is your trades business ready for the biggest tax change in a generation?
If you're a self-employed tradesperson (whether you're an electrician, plumber, gas engineer, heating engineer or something else entirely), one of the most significant changes to the UK tax system is already here, and it affects how you record your income, store your invoices, and report to HMRC.
Making Tax Digital (MTD) for Income Tax came into force on 6 April 2026. If your annual qualifying income exceeds £50,000, you're already required to comply. If you're earning between £30,000 and £50,000, you'll be brought into scope from April 2027 - meaning the clock is ticking for the vast majority of tradespeople across the UK.
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What is Making Tax Digital?
The government is replacing the traditional annual Self Assessment tax return with a system of quarterly digital submissions. Under the new rules, HMRC now requires you to:
- Keep digital records of all your income and expenses - paper receipts and handwritten logs are no longer acceptable
- Submit quarterly updates to HMRC summarising your income and expenditure, with deadlines in August, November, February, and May
- Complete a final year-end declaration to confirm your overall tax position
This is a fundamental shift in how tradespeople must interact with HMRC. It's not just an admin change: it directly affects how you record your earnings job by job, how you store invoices, and how you track your outgoings throughout the year, rather than at year-end.
The challenge for busy tradespeople
When you're out in the field every day - running jobs, managing engineers, ordering parts, and keeping customers happy - finding time to maintain meticulous digital financial records is easier said than done. The old approach of keeping paper receipts in a folder and handing everything to an accountant in January simply won't work anymore.
That's before you factor in the risk of errors. With four quarterly submissions per year going directly to HMRC, accuracy matters more than ever, and more regularly than ever.
The good news? It’s not as complicated as it sounds. Eworks is already equipped with the tools you need to submit your updates, so if you’re already using the system, you already have access to the solution.
How Eworks keeps you MTD ready
Because Eworks already helps tradespeople manage jobs, quotes, invoices, and expenses digitally, it naturally supports the shift away from paper-based admin that MTD is designed to eliminate. Here's how:
Every job creates a digital financial record. When your engineers complete a job on the Eworks app, the work order, timesheet, and invoice are captured digitally and synced to the admin system in real time. There's no end-of-month scramble to piece together what happened - it’s all there, timestamped and organised.
Invoicing happens at the point of job completion. With Eworks, you can create and send invoices directly from the mobile app the moment a job is signed off. That means your income records always stay current, not crammed in before a quarterly deadline.
Expenses are tracked job by job. Eworks lets you log billable and non-billable expenses against specific jobs or projects from both the app and the admin system, keeping an accurate running total of your outgoings as a natural part of how you already work.
It integrates with MTD-compatible accounting software. Eworks Manager integrates directly with Xero, QuickBooks, and Sage: three of the most widely used MTD-compatible platforms. Your job data flows into your accounts automatically, so quarterly submissions can be pulled together without hours of manual data entry.
Reporting is built in. Eworks' comprehensive reporting suite gives you invoice summaries, job summaries, and financial overviews on demand. When it's time to pull together your quarterly figures, the data is already organised and ready.
What you should do now
If you haven't yet confirmed your MTD obligations or spoken to your accountant about compliance, now is the time. HMRC has confirmed it won't issue penalties for late quarterly submissions during the first year as everyone gets up to speed with the new process, but that won’t last forever. It’s better to get it right now and make the submissions become second nature.
Already an Eworks customer? Make sure you're making full use of the invoicing, expenses, and reporting features, and speak to your accountant about connecting your Eworks data to an MTD-compatible platform like Xero or QuickBooks.
Not yet on Eworks? There's never been a better time to make the switch. Book a free demo today and see how we can help your trades business stay compliant and stay in control.
