I attended a webinar on Making Tax Digital (Difficult) yesterday. As far as I can tell, I have to submit (via proprietary software) two figures each quarter, namely my cumulative income and expenditure. I will still have to do a final declaration at the end of the year.
I am struggling to see how this helps me or HMRC or indeed anyone who isn't a cloud accountancy software provider rubbing their hands at all the extra compulsory sales they're going to make.
Basically instead of filing self-assessment once a year - which I do already and takes me about an hour - using the HMRC website (free) and whatever accounting software I want to keep my records (in my case an open source solution), I have to use a proprietary cloud provider and file every quarter PLUS self-assessment.
It's just another public sector IT project not thought through, like smart meters (which originally stopped working if you changed supplier) and now digital ID cards.
