Money Matters

Operational checklist: Before you price for MTD for Income Tax, answer these questions

A practical checklist for accounting and bookkeeping practices preparing for the year-round work MTD for Income Tax can create.

20 April, 20265 min read Share

You might already be doing more work between deadlines than you used to.

The risk is that it stays invisible, so it never makes it into your fees. If you haven’t yet looked at how MTD changes your pricing model, start there first.

Recent Hidden Hours research from Sage suggests many firms are already absorbing operational support, review, and follow-up work between deadlines without consistently pricing for it. MTD for Income Tax increases the visibility and frequency of those pressures.

With MTD for Income Tax, many practices will need to review records more regularly, spot issues earlier, and handle corrections throughout the year, not just at submission time.

If you’re still planning for MTD as “quarterly submissions”, this checklist will help you spot the extra review, governance, and client management work that often sits behind them, so you can price it properly.

If you’re at the point where pricing decisions need to be made, we want to help you make them based on how your firm actually operates today.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

Who this checklist is for

This checklist is designed for accounting and bookkeeping practices that: 

• support clients with MTD for VAT and expect to support unincorporated clients with MTD for Income Tax
• are seeing more review, correction, and client-management work between deadlines
• want pricing that reflects the time and responsibility involved

Work through each section quickly. Where the answer is “no” or unclear, that’s where hidden work is already building — and where pricing needs to change.

1. Operating cadence

Is your work still deadline-led, or already more month-to-month?

Questions to ask:

• Do you review client records every month, not just at quarter end?
• Is responsibility for mid-quarter oversight clearly assigned?
• Do you have a defined process for incomplete records before submission windows?
• Do you treat spreadsheet or bridging-software clients as an exception, and price the extra handling time?
• Can you quantify review time per client outside deadline periods?

If most answers are “no”, your workflow is still deadline-driven — and MTD will expose that quickly.

2. Client behaviour controls

When work happens throughout the year, client behaviour has a direct cost.

Questions to ask:

• Do engagement letters define data delivery deadlines?
• Are late or incomplete records linked to pricing consequences?
• Do you segment clients by record quality?
• Is record cleanliness tracked or reviewed proactively?
• Have clients been formally notified of their data responsibilities under MTD?

If behaviour isn’t managed, pricing will absorb the variance — and that shows up as margin loss.

3. Responsibility boundaries

If issues aren’t spotted early, they can roll forward.

Questions to ask:

• Is liability clearly documented when data is incomplete?
• Are review responsibilities defined between firm and client?
• Is there clarity on what happens if data arrives after submission?
• When a client changes hands internally, is the handover documented so responsibility stays clear?
• Do you have a documented process for corrections and re-exposure?

If responsibility isn’t bounded, exposure accumulates quietly — and becomes harder to control once work is already underway.

4. Capacity visibility

Invisible hours are margin risk.

Questions to ask:

• Can you measure review time variance across similar clients?
• Have you measured how many non-billable hours MTD creates?
• Are junior vs senior review levels clearly defined?
• Can you identify clients who create disproportionate workload?
• Have you modelled capacity under full MTD rollout?

If you can’t measure exposure, you can’t price it — and that’s where hidden hours start to build. Many firms already absorb these operational hours informally until workload pressure makes them impossible to ignore.

5. Pricing alignment

What you’re pricing has changed.

Questions to ask:

• Is pricing linked to workload variability?
• Do you use retainers rather than annual bursts?
• Are pricing reviews triggered by behavioural change?
• Do proposals reference ongoing responsibility rather than submissions?
• Does your fee structure protect margin under imperfect client behaviour?

If pricing assumes perfect behaviour, the risk sits with you — and that risk compounds over time.

• If your gaps cluster in sections 1–3, your practice is still operating on an episodic model.

• If they cluster in sections 4–5, your model has shifted, but the economics haven’t caught up.

Either way, your starting point is the same: price for the work you’re doing, not just the visible work.

You may have already changed how you work because of MTD.

The real question is whether your pricing reflects the extra review, follow-ups, and responsibility that now sits behind each submission.

Next step

If you’re going to act on this, don’t leave it as a set of ideas.

Use the MTD for Income Tax playbook to turn it into a structured plan across your firm.

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