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Most people choosing Making Tax Digital software assume they are choosing one product. HMRC's own guidance does not assume that, and the software market makes the assumption harder to hold than it looks.
The guidance is explicit: "If you prefer, you can choose to use more than one software product, but you can only use one product for each separate submission that you need to make to HMRC."
That sentence is doing two jobs. It permits a two-product setup. It also rules out splitting a single submission across two tools. Understanding where the line falls is the difference between a tidy year and a January scramble.
Why this question exists at all
Under Making Tax Digital for Income Tax you make several distinct submissions in a year. Four quarterly updates per income source, then a final declaration that pulls the whole picture together and confirms your tax liability.
Different software is good at different parts of that. A tool built into your bank account is excellent at categorising trade income and sending quarterly updates. It may have nothing to say about your workplace pension, your dividends or your student loan, all of which have to appear before your final declaration is complete.
HMRC grades this directly. Every product on the find-software directory is assessed against 16 tax-return items, and the results are stark.
103of 152 (68%)cannot complete a single tax-return itemHMRC MTD for Income Tax directory, scraped 2 October 2026HMRC lists what each vendor declares. Feature flags, mobile-app support in particular, are vendor claims rather than verified facts, and listings change. Check with the vendor before you buy. Data: HMRC find-MTD-software service (tax.service.gov.uk), scraped 2 October 2026.
Seventy-one percent of the listed market is a quarterly-updates machine and nothing more. At the other end:
39of 152 (26%)have 9 or more of the 16 return items readyHMRC MTD for Income Tax directory, scraped 2 October 2026- The 16 tax-return items
- HMRC's directory grades every product against 16 components of a complete Self Assessment return: employment (PAYE) income, UK and foreign dividends, UK and foreign interest, state and private pension income, private pension contributions, partner income from a partnership, Construction Industry Scheme, charitable giving, capital gains, Student Loan, Marriage Allowance, voluntary Class 2 National Insurance, and the High Income Child Benefit Charge. A product graded ready on none of them can still send quarterly updates.
The rule you cannot break
The constraint in HMRC's sentence matters more than the permission. One product per submission means:
You can use product A for your self-employment quarterly updates and product B for your UK property quarterly updates. Those are separate submissions for separate income sources.
You can use product A all year for quarterly updates and product B for the final declaration. Again, separate submissions.
You cannot compile half of one quarterly update in a spreadsheet-based tool and the other half in an app, then submit the merged figure. That single submission must come from one product, with the digital records behind it linked digitally rather than retyped.
That last point is where bridging software earns its place. HMRC describes it as software that "will connect to existing records kept in spreadsheets or other accounting tools". Of the 144 listed products, 73 offer bridging and 24 do bridging only, with no native record keeping of their own.
23of 152 (15%)do bridging only, with no digital record-keepingHMRC MTD for Income Tax directory, scraped 2 October 2026When two products is the right answer
Sometimes it genuinely is. Four situations where a second product is reasonable rather than a failure of planning:
Your accountant files your return. They have agent software, you have a record-keeping app. That is two products by design, and 86 of the 152 listed products offer agent access to make it work.
Your income sources are genuinely different animals. A trade with hundreds of transactions and a single rental property have different bookkeeping needs. Running a bank-integrated tool for the trade and something simpler for the property is defensible.
You are mid-year and your current tool cannot finish. Switching is easier than it sounds, because quarterly updates are cumulative: the new product submits year-to-date totals, so nothing is lost as long as you carry your figures across. Doing this in November is a task. Doing it in January is a problem.
You have a niche the market ignores. Foreign property is the classic example. Only 77 of the 152 listed products handle it, and several highly complete products, including QuickBooks, Sage's sole trader and landlord products and FreeAgent, do not. If your otherwise perfect product cannot file your overseas pages, a second tool for that source is a legitimate fallback.
What two products actually costs you
Nobody plans for a two-product setup. People arrive at one, usually in the last quarter, and discover the costs afterwards.
Two subscriptions. Often the smallest cost, and the only one anybody mentions.
Two sets of digital records. MTD requires digital records to be kept and linked digitally. Two products means two record stores, two backups and two things to export if you ever leave.
Two HMRC authorisations to maintain. Each product holds its own connection to your HMRC account, and each one expires, needs reauthorising and can fail quietly at the worst moment.
Reconciliation at final declaration. This is the real cost. Your final declaration has to agree with the quarterly updates already submitted. When those came from a different product with different categorisation, you are checking totals by hand at the point of maximum time pressure.
Two places to be wrong. Duplicated income is the classic two-product error: an amount captured by both tools and reported twice, or a transfer between accounts treated as income in one product and ignored in the other.
“The number of products is not the goal. Getting every income source, every return item and your chosen update period covered is the goal. For a lot of people that is one product, and for some people it honestly is not.”
The one-product test
HMRC's guidance sets out what your software needs to do, and it makes a clean checklist. Work through these four questions about any product you are considering, and you will know whether one is enough.
1. Does it support all your income sources?
Sole trade, UK property, foreign property. On the current scrape, 138 products handle sole trader income and 128 handle UK property, while only 77 handle foreign property. That last figure is the one that decides this question for most people with anything overseas.
74of 152 (49%)handle all three income sourcesHMRC MTD for Income Tax directory, scraped 2 October 20262. Can it send both the quarterly updates and the tax return?
Quarterly updates are near-universal. The return is not, which is what the 16 items measure. A product graded at zero items can run your whole year and then leave you needing something else.
3. Can it report all your other income?
This is the one people underestimate. Not business income, everything else: the part-time job with PAYE income, the dividends from a small shareholding, the savings interest, the state pension, the student loan repayments, the High Income Child Benefit Charge if you or your partner earn over £60,000. Every one of those is a separate item on the directory's grading, and every one can be the thing that forces a second product.
4. Does it work with your accounting period?
Standard tax-year quarters or calendar quarters. Every listed product supports standard periods, but 30 cannot do calendar periods. Our guide to standard vs calendar quarters explains which to choose and when you have to choose it.
How many products pass all four?
Combine the tests and the field narrows sharply. Products covering all three income sources, with nine or more of the 16 return items ready, and calendar quarters available, come to twenty-nine of the 152 as graded on 2 October 2026.
| Product | Free | Sole trader | UK property | Foreign property | Mobile app | Return items |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MTD Companion for macOS | Not included | Ready now | Ready now | Ready now | Not listed | 16/16 |
| MTD Companion for iPhone & iPad | Not included | Ready now | Ready now | Ready now | Apple iOS | 16/16 |
| MTD 4 Income Tax | Not included | Ready now | Ready now | Ready now | Android; Apple iOS | 16/16 |
| My Tax Digital (Free) | Ready now | Ready now | Ready now | Ready now | Not listed | 15/16 |
| Abridge (MTD for Excel/Sheets) | Not included | Ready now | Ready now | Ready now | Android; Apple iOS | 15/16 |
| TaxHeaven | Ready now | Ready now | Ready now | Ready now | Not listed | 15/16 |
| TaxUpdates | Ready now | Ready now | Ready now | Ready now | Not listed | 15/16 |
| RentalBux Free | Ready now | Ready now | Ready now | Ready now | Android; Apple iOS | 15/16 |
| untied | Not included | Ready now | Ready now | Ready now | Android; Apple iOS | 15/16 |
| Forbes MTD | Not included | Ready now | Ready now | Ready now | Android | 15/16 |
| AbraTax MTD for Income Tax | Not included | Ready now | Ready now | Ready now | Not listed | 16/16 |
| RentalBux | Not included | Ready now | Ready now | Ready now | Android; Apple iOS | 15/16 |
| Capium Limited - MTD for IT | Not included | Ready now | Ready now | Ready now | Not listed | 14/16 |
| Absolute Excel Income Tax Filer | Not included | Ready now | Ready now | Ready now | Not listed | 11/16 |
| 123 e-Filing MTD for Income Tax | Not included | Ready now | Ready now | Ready now | Not listed | 16/16 |
| VitalTax | Not included | Ready now | Ready now | Ready now | Android; Apple iOS | 9/16 |
| Self Assessment Direct | Ready now | Ready now | Ready now | Ready now | Android; Apple iOS | 9/16 |
That is not many out of 144, and it is more than enough to choose from. The point is that the one-product path exists but is not the default: you have to select for it deliberately, because most of the market is not built for it.
If your return is simpler than the full picture, more products qualify. A sole trader with one trade, no property and no other income has a much wider field, and a free bank tool may genuinely be all they need. Work from your own return rather than from the maximum case.
Where TapTax sits, honestly
TapTax is built for the one-product path: sole trader, UK property and foreign property income, standard and calendar update periods, quarterly updates and the final declaration crystallisation flow, on a permanent free tier at £0 a month with £4.99 and £9.99 tiers above it, on iOS, Android and web.
Two honest caveats:
- TapTax is HMRC-recognised, with its directory listing pending, and it does not appear on the find-software directory as of the 28 September 2026 scrape. Every product in the table above is listed today.
- On the 16 return items, TapTax is mid-pack rather than top of the table. Interest, dividends, charitable giving, the High Income Child Benefit Charge and Class 2 and 4 National Insurance are covered; pension income, Construction Industry Scheme, capital gains and partnership income are not there yet. If your return depends on those, one of the 15-item products above will serve you better today, and we would rather say so here than have you find out in January.
You can filter the whole dataset on the MTD software directory, and our analysis of every tool explains how the completeness gap formed. If you are weighing a free bank tool for the quarterly cycle, bank free MTD tools compared covers exactly where that setup runs out.
The short answer
You probably do not need more than one MTD product, but you will end up with one unless you check. Start from your own tax return rather than from your bookkeeping. Write down every source of income you had last year, including the ones that never touch your business bank account, then hold that list against the four questions above.
If one product covers the list, buy it once and stop thinking about this. If nothing covers the list, choose your second product deliberately and early, in autumn rather than in January, and decide up front which product owns which submission.
People also ask
Can I use a spreadsheet plus bridging software instead of one app?
Yes. HMRC accepts spreadsheets as digital records provided the link between the spreadsheet and the submission is digital rather than retyped, which is exactly what bridging software provides. Seventy-one of the 144 listed products offer bridging and 23 do bridging only. It is also the cheapest route in the market, at roughly £8 to £40 per taxpayer per year for tools such as Absolute Excel Income Tax Filer, VitalTax and 123 Sheets as of August 2026. The trade-off is that you own the spreadsheet discipline yourself, with no categorisation or bank feed doing it for you.
If I use two products, which one submits the final declaration?
Whichever one can, and only one of them does it. The final declaration is a single submission, so it must come from a single product, and that product needs to be able to report every income source and return item you have. In practice this means the more complete product handles the final declaration while the simpler one handles quarterly updates for its income source. Agree this before the tax year ends rather than in the week the declaration is due, because the reconciliation between the two takes longer than the submission does.
Does using two products increase my chance of an HMRC enquiry?
There is no evidence that the number of products you use is itself a risk factor, and HMRC explicitly permits multiple products. What can raise questions is the thing two products makes more likely: figures that do not reconcile, income reported twice, or a final declaration that disagrees with the quarterly updates already submitted. The mitigation is process rather than product choice. Decide which tool owns which income source, never let both categorise the same transaction, and reconcile the totals before you submit the final declaration.
Can my accountant use their own software while I use mine?
Yes, and this is the most common two-product arrangement in practice. You keep digital records and, depending on the arrangement, send quarterly updates from your own software, while your accountant uses agent software to review and submit on your behalf. Seventy-five of the 144 listed products offer agent software, so check that your tool supports agent access before assuming your accountant can get in. Notably, none of the free bank MTD tools from Monzo, Starling, Lloyds, Tide or ANNA offers agent access as of the 28 September 2026 scrape.