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Making Tax Digital: the 7 August deadline
More than 864,000 sole traders and landlords have until 7th August 2026 to send HMRC their first quarterly update under making tax digital (MTD) for income tax. Among them are hundreds of thousands of construction subcontractors: the fitters, plasterers, sparkies, brickies and groundworkers paid under the construction industry scheme (CIS).
Plenty of them have not started with just two weeks to go but the job is a lot smaller than the noise around it.
With invoices and expenses to hand, a subbie can get the whole quarter into CIS Invoice and submitted in under an hour. Most will do it quicker.
The first thing to know is what the update is not.
It is not a tax return.
It is a short summary of income and expenses for 6th April to 5th July, sent straight to HMRC through recognised software. No forms, no accountant’s waiting room, no shoebox of receipts. Some report on calendar quarters instead, 1st April to 30th June. Either way the deadline is still 7th August.
“We hear the same thing on every site. The wife does my invoices at the weekend. That worked when it was once a year. It doesn’t work when HMRC wants a summary every three months. Do the invoice on the phone when you come off site and the quarterly update builds itself. She gets her Saturdays back and you get a proper set of records.” says Paul Edwards, founder, Aperture Works
CIS Invoice, recognised by HMRC as compatible software, was built for the trade and MTD tax scheme. There is no chart of accounts, no bank reconciliation and no bookkeeping language to learn. A subbie who has never touched accounting software can send a compliant invoice within minutes of downloading it.
The workflow is the one they already use. Pick the days worked, set a day rate, price or hourly rate, and the app handles the CIS deduction, 20%for registered subcontractors, and puts it plainly on the PDF the contractor gets. Come quarter end, the app has already totalled every invoice and every expense. Submitting to HMRC is a case of checking the numbers and pressing one button.
Submitting costs nothing. The MTD submission is free on both tiers. Records stay on the user’s own phone and nothing passes through Aperture Works servers.
Many subbies are handing the problem to an accountant or a bookkeeper. That is a fair choice, but it is not a shortcut. The accountant still cannot file anything without the underlying records, and most are taking the client on for the year rather than fixing a single quarter.
From April 2027,MTD extends to those earning more than £30,000 and more than £20,000 from April 2028. That pulls in a far larger share of the UK’s self-employed construction workforce.
Article written by John Roper
27th July 2026