Docket

Use it for

MTD for Income Tax: the receipts bit

The filing software is the easy half, and much of it is free. The half that goes wrong is having a complete, dated record of what you actually spent — captured while the receipt still exists.

What is changing, and when

HMRC has already written to around 864,000 sole traders and landlords. This is a deadline, not a proposal.

  • April 2026 — MTD for Income Tax applies to self-employed people and landlords with qualifying income over £50,000.
  • April 2027 — the threshold drops to £30,000. April 2028 — £20,000.
  • Quarterly updates replace one annual scramble with four, so the January approach stops working by arithmetic alone.
  • The requirement is a digital record of each transaction: its date, its amount and its category. A shoebox is no longer a filing system, and neither is a camera roll.

Capture the record where the receipt is

  • Photograph a till receipt or forward an invoice PDF to a WhatsApp contact. No app, no login, no form.
  • The date, vendor, total, currency and category are read off the document itself — that is the digital record HMRC is asking for.
  • The file lands in your own Google Drive, under the month printed on it, in one of sixteen fixed categories.
  • export q1 2026 writes the quarter as a CSV: one row per transaction, with the date, amount and category.
  • Anything it could not read fully is flagged by review instead of being quietly guessed at.

Read this before you buy anything

Docket is not MTD software and does not submit your quarterly updates

It is not HMRC-recognised, it does not connect to HMRC, and it will never file a return on your behalf. Any product page that is vague about this is worth closing.

Several MTD-recognised packages for sole traders are free. If all you need is the submission, use one of those — there is no reason to pay for it.

What none of them do is get the receipt out of your pocket. Every one of them requires you to open an app and enter something, which is the step that does not happen on a Thursday afternoon. Docket does that step inside the app you already have open, and hands the result — as a CSV, in your own Drive — to whatever keeps your digital records and files your return.

What the CSV gives your accountant

One row per document, in the shape a digital record is supposed to take.

  • The date printed on the document, not the day it was sent.
  • Vendor, total and currency, read off the document itself.
  • The category it was filed under, from a fixed list of sixteen.
  • A link to the original file in your Drive, so any figure can be checked against the paper it came from.

Written to an Exports folder in your own Drive, so the export outlives the chat.

The part that matters most

The documents are written into your Google Drive, in a folder you named. Not our storage with an export button — your account, your folders, your files.

  • We never keep a copy. The file is read in memory, written to your Drive, and dropped.
  • Your documents are never used to train an AI model.
  • Send logout to disconnect at any time and keep everything already filed.
How a document is handled

Questions

Does this do my tax return?

No. Docket is not tax software and does not file anything with HMRC. What it does is capture the digital record HMRC wants — the date, amount and category of each transaction — at the moment the receipt exists, and put the document in your own Drive. Then `export` hands the period over as a CSV for whoever files the return.

Will my accountant accept this?

It is the format they already ask for: dated folders of the original documents, plus a CSV with the date, vendor, total, currency and category of each one. Send `link march` for a single month's folder, or `export` for the spreadsheet. The files live in your Drive, so you can share a folder rather than email an attachment.

Do I have to keep the paper?

HMRC's digital record requirement is about the transaction data, not the scan — it accepts images but does not demand them. Keeping the photograph is still the easiest way to prove a figure years later, which is why Docket files the document itself rather than only the numbers off it. Whether you also keep the paper is between you and your accountant.

Start before April

The first quarterly update is easier if the quarter was already being filed as it happened.

7 days free. No app to install.