Making Tax Digital client communication is the part of MTD that practices have costed least and will feel most. The software question — which package, which bridging tool — has an answer you can buy. The communication question does not, because what changes is not the filing mechanism but the number of times a practice has to get information out of a client who would rather be running their business.
What is actually changing, and when
The phasing is set out on GOV.UK. Making Tax Digital for Income Tax applies from 6 April 2026 where qualifying income exceeds £50,000 for the 2024 to 2025 tax year. It reaches £30,000 for the 2025 to 2026 tax year from 6 April 2027, and £20,000 for the 2026 to 2027 tax year from 6 April 2028.
Two things follow that are worth stating plainly.
First, the thresholds have moved before. Any practice planning around them should re-check the guidance rather than a summary of it — including this one. Treat the dates as current at the time of reading and verify before acting.
Second, the population grows as the threshold falls. The clients captured at £20,000 are not the clients captured at £50,000. They are typically smaller, less likely to use accounting software, less likely to have a bookkeeper, and considerably more likely to need chasing. The communication burden per client rises exactly as the number of clients rises.
Annual to quarterly is not a four-times-the-work problem
It is tempting to model this as a fourfold increase in effort. That overstates the preparation and badly understates the contact.
The preparation does not quadruple, because much of the annual cycle is fixed cost that gets spread. What does quadruple is the number of moments at which a practice needs something from someone: four windows in which records must be complete, four rounds of reminders, four opportunities for a client to go quiet, four chances to discover in the last week that something is missing.
That is the load. And it is a load that scales with the least reliable input in the whole process, which is client responsiveness.
A practice that currently absorbs the annual cycle through personal diligence — a senior who knows which clients are slow and rings them in December — does not get to quarterly by working harder. There is no version of that approach that survives being run four times a year across a larger client base.
What to automate, and what not to
The automatable part is larger than most practices assume, because the work is sequenced and produces no professional judgement.
Automate the request. Per client, per quarter, a specific list of what is outstanding — not a generic prompt. Specific requests get responses; generic ones get ignored.
Automate the escalation. A defined sequence with tone and channel changing as the quarter-end approaches, agreed once rather than improvised every time.
Automate the stop. The system must know the moment a document arrives and cease chasing for it. Being chased for something already sent is the single fastest way to make clients distrust the whole arrangement.
Automate the visibility. Anyone should be able to see the state of every client without asking the person who usually handles it.
Do not automate the judgement. Whether a figure looks wrong, whether an unusual transaction needs a conversation, whether a client's silence is disorganisation or something that needs a harder question — that is professional work. The system routes it to a person; it does not resolve it.
Do not automate the difficult conversation. A client who has missed three quarters needs a call, not a fifth templated email. Automation should be what tells you to make that call.
The quiet advantage: clients get better
There is a second-order effect worth planning for deliberately.
Under an annual cycle, a disorganised client can stay disorganised for eleven months and be rescued in the twelfth. A quarterly cycle removes that hiding place. Practices generally treat this as a burden — more chasing, more friction — but it also produces the first real opportunity in years to change client behaviour, because the feedback loop is finally short enough to matter.
A client reminded specifically and promptly four times a year is being trained, gently, into a habit. A client rescued once a year never is. The practices that come out of MTD in better shape will be the ones that used the rhythm to fix the input rather than absorbing the mess faster.
Start now, for an unglamorous reason
The sequence a practice needs for quarterly reporting is the same sequence it already needs for the annual Self Assessment chase. Building it once, in a quiet month, gets both.
Building it in the first live quarter — under a real deadline, with a client base that has not been briefed — is a considerably worse plan, and it is the one most practices are currently on track for.
We have written about the annual version of this in automating client record chasing before 31 January, and about the wider practice picture on our AI for accountants page.
The short version
MTD is a communication change wearing a filing change's clothes. The touchpoints multiply, the client base grows less organised as thresholds fall, and personal diligence does not scale to four times a year. Automate the request, the escalation, the stop and the visibility. Keep the judgement and the hard conversations with a person. Build it before the first live quarter, not during it.