Quarterly submissions

Rather than submitting an annual tax return, the MTD mandation requires tax agents to submit quarterly updates for each income and expense category before creating the final declaration. As of April 2026, these categories are:

• Self-employment
• UK properties
• Foreign (overseas) properties

Prerequisites

Before you can submit quarterly updates, you must:

• Sign up your client to the MTD mandation.
• Register your client as enrolled in MTD in IRIS Elements.
• Authorise IRIS Elements with HMRC for MTD submissions.
• Make sure your client is registering their income sources from self-employment, UK property, and foreign properties. These can either be:
  • Recorded via a bookkeeping application such as IRIS Elements Cashbook — These records can be digitally submitted direct to HMRC via the bookkeeping app. IRIS Elements can then pull the records from HMRC to create the quarterly submissions.
  • Recorded in a spreadsheet application — These can be directly imported into IRIS Elements to create the quarterly submission.

    Download the MTD ITSA templates to send to your clients to record their income,

Send quarterly updates

1. From the Clients menu, select Clients list.
2. Change the client list view to either Active clients or a custom view that includes all relevant clients.

If any of the entries are greyed out and you cannot select them, this is a restricted item — the parent client record has been set to Private and you do not have access. If you believe this is a mistake, contact your IRIS Elements administrator. Users who have Administrator level permissions are able to view all public and private client records, even those where they are not named as assigned users.

3. Open the relevant client record.
4. Go to the MTD tab.

   Learn more about the MTD tab in our Client record: The MTD tab video.

   If the error No MTD details have been found is displayed, go back to the Integrations settings and make sure you entered your government agent services account (ASA) details and not your Government Gateway account details.

5. Select the relevant category's obligation.
6. If your client has been uploading their income directly to HMRC, via a bookkeeping application for example, their uploaded figures are retrieved from HMRC. This process occurs daily but you can select HMRC Data Retrieval to refresh the figures.
7. If your client has provided a spreadsheet of figures, select Upload summary data and follow the steps on screen to submit.

   This spreadsheet must follow the specified template format otherwise the upload will fail.

8. Return to the MTD tab.

   The status is updated to Sent.

Did you know?
You can amend any quarterly update, even after it has been submitted, up until the year-end submission.