Making Tax Digital for counsellors and psychotherapists: where Psycounts is, and what's coming

Making Tax Digital · Psycounts Team

Making Tax Digital is the topic on many of our members' minds right now — and with the first mandation date behind us and more practitioners joining over the next two years, it's time for a proper update: what MTD means for you, where Psycounts is, and what's coming next.

What Making Tax Digital means for you

Making Tax Digital (MTD) for Income Tax is HMRC's new way of reporting self-employment income, and it is no longer on the horizon — it's here. Since 6 April 2026, sole traders with qualifying income over £50,000 (based on their 2024–25 tax return) are required to follow the MTD rules. Those with qualifying income over £30,000 join from April 2027, and over £20,000 from April 2028.

If you run your practice as a sole trader — as most counsellors and psychotherapists in private practice do — MTD will apply to you at one of those dates. In practical terms it means three things:

  • Digital records. Your self-employment income and expenses must be created, stored and corrected as digital records — a paper ledger or a drawer of receipts no longer counts.
  • Quarterly updates. Instead of one annual Self Assessment, you send HMRC a summary of your income and expenses every quarter, through MTD-compatible software (due by 7 August, 7 November, 7 February and 7 May).
  • A final declaration. You still finalise your tax position after the year ends, by 31 January the following year.

You can check if and when MTD applies to you on GOV.UK.

Where Psycounts is with MTD

We've been building Making Tax Digital directly into Psycounts, on top of HMRC's official MTD for Income Tax APIs — no third-party bridging tools, no exporting spreadsheets into another product.

The core of the feature is working today in HMRC's test environment, on both the web app and the iOS app. That includes:

  • Securely connecting your Psycounts account to HMRC
  • Seeing your quarterly obligations and their deadlines at a glance
  • Building each quarterly update from the income and expense records you already keep in Psycounts — with a review step before anything is sent
  • Choosing between cash basis and accruals accounting, per tax year
  • Viewing HMRC's own tax calculation, so you can see your estimated position through the year rather than being surprised in January

We're targeting a release in late 2026 to early 2027, ahead of the April 2027 mandation date that will bring many practitioners into MTD. It will be included in your existing Psycounts subscription — no extra charge.

A preview

Here's an early look at MTD in the Psycounts iOS app, connected to HMRC's test environment.

Psycounts iOS app Making Tax Digital menu with setup and filing sections
Psycounts iOS app showing HMRC quarterly obligations and their due dates

The MTD hub and your quarterly obligations in the Psycounts iOS app.

Why an all-in-one solution matters for MTD

The hardest part of Making Tax Digital isn't the quarterly submission — it's having clean, complete digital records ready when the deadline comes round. This is where running your whole practice in one place pays off.

In Psycounts, your records build themselves as you work. Appointments are scheduled in your calendar; completed appointments become invoices; paid invoices become income records. Expenses are logged as they happen, with their receipts. By the time a quarterly deadline arrives, your digital records for the quarter already exist — because they're simply the record of you running your practice. The quarterly update becomes a review and submit, not a scramble through bank statements and spreadsheets.

That's the one-stop-shop idea behind Psycounts: appointment → invoice → income, plus expenses, flowing straight into your MTD digital records and on to HMRC — all in one place, on the web and on your iPhone.

One honest note on scope: Psycounts supports MTD for self-employment (sole trader) income only. If you also have property, partnership or other income to report under MTD, you'd need additional compatible software for those sources — see our Self Assessment FAQ for details.

What's next

We'll post progress updates here as we move towards release, including a closer look at the quarterly update flow and guidance on getting your records MTD-ready. You can follow along via RSS or on LinkedIn.

And if you'd like your practice admin — and your MTD records — to take care of themselves, you can create a Psycounts account today or download the app from the App Store.