Readers’ forum: Spreadsheets and MTD

After making sure that my own business and my one compulsorily VAT-registered client are on annual accounting to delay the onset of MTD I am finally having to face up to it (accounting periods commencing from 1 October).

The thing that has galled me is the apparent necessity to spend money on expensive software for businesses that are too simple to need an accounts package with insufficient economies of scale to spread the cost.

It now occurs to me reading the regulations that the digital VAT account does not have to be part of an integrated accounting package. It would be very easy to set up a spreadsheet that only recorded the VAT information and was sufficient to meet the requirements of the law for input tax and output tax and was completely separate from any other part of the accounting...