Personal Tax – MTD Quarters Q&A 2026 onwards

personal-tax-mtd-quarters-qa-2026-onwards

Personal Tax – MTD Quarters Q&A 2026 onwards

31st March 2026

As MTD is now mandatory from 2026 onwards, there are new questions raised and we shall add the answer here:

Common terms used in Personal Tax: ‘Digital Tax Hub’ (DTH) – At the top of PT, Digital Tax, Digital tax hub, select Trade/property – once you retrieved the quarters from HMRC and imported income etc they will appear here.

1.How to set up MTD and retrieve quarters for my PT clients? Read this KB on the main actions needed to set it up

2. Can I access training Videos and Webinars? Please read this KB here on INSIGHTS

3. Retrieved quarter periods but they wont appear/and MATCHING RESOURCE NOT FOUND  – Read this KB as HMRC may not require the data until next tax year and thus no quarter periods will show.

4. If a client falls under the income threshold (eg below £20K)? Once mandated by HMRC, a taxpayer remains in MTD for a minimum of three years even if the qualifying income falls below the respective threshold, unless they terminate the self employment and inform HMRC via the software. They may still be required to send rental figures via MTD if they had both. The clients should however consult HMRC guidance first 

5. Multiple properties – How to import rent/expenses etc per property? You will need to assign all entries to one of the multiple properties – on the IMPORT screens once you have downloaded the CSV file, click on the header “Property” and you will see the list of all the properties saved in PT.

6. Does IRIS offer any non-bridging software? Answer: We have an IRIS Kashflow/Cashbook solution (Cashbook is free to our IAS Tax users dependent on license limits)

7. The training videos imply that data could be manually input into excel and converted to a CSV for upload. Is this deemed to be digital? Answer: HMRC does in fact accept excels as digital record keeping and IRIS has functionality to consume transactional data electronically which passes digital link rules and so yes this is acceptable

8. Why are the MTD periods showing incorrectly (eg 6 April 2025 to 5 January 2026)? This is a HMRC decision: When the user retrieves period data from HMRC, the period returned is based on HMRC’s cumulative reporting structure, NOT the full tax year. HMRC does not return data up to the end of the tax year (5 April) unless the taxpayer is already in that period. Instead, HMRC returns: Start date: the start of the tax year (always 6 April), and End date: the end of the current quarterly update period that the taxpayer is currently in. This means the end date changes depending on when the retrieval is performed: So if a retrieval is triggered today 19 November 2025, HMRC considers the user to be in Quarter 3, so the cumulative period it returns is 6 April 2025 to 5 January 2026, once the date passes 5 January 2026, the same retrieval will return 6 April 2025 to 5 April 2026 because the client will then be in Quarter 4, which is the final cumulative period of the year.

9. Get error: INVALID REQUEST- BUSINESSES ID IS BLANK. When clicking ‘Retrieve periods’. Click on the button from the ‘Period Settings’ screen, you would have to select the correct business from the “Unmatched record screen” and Click OK. This will match the trade with your client and HMRC MTD.

10. What are the ‘Status types’ for each quarter in DTH? 1. Awaiting Action, 2. In Progress, 3. Approved, 4. Rejected. If you use the ‘Reset Status’ option for a specific quarter it will change the status to ‘Awaiting Action’.

11. Reasons why submission was REJECTED: If the status says ‘REJECTED’ then go to option ‘Previous submissions’ then you can find the rejection and reason for rejection.

12. Why it shows the same values on all quarters and Reporting types of the quarters? In specific reports it will list the per quarters values as a cumulative total which include any prior quarters. This is by HMRC design. For example Quarter 1 income is £1000, Q2 income is £500, Q3 is £0 and Q4 is £0. When you run certain reports which lists the 4 quarters it may a £1500 per quarter, rather then £1000 for 1st and £500 for 2nd and if you only enter for Q1- this value will appear on Q2/3/4 as well. Only specific reports will use the cumulative totals.