Most UK firms are still treating MTD for Income Tax as a compliance project. At our recent Leading Voice Broadcast, Ryan Diplexcito of Johnston Carmichael offered a reframe that carries commercial weight most firms have not yet calculated.
The conversation in the trade press has settled on MTD for Income Tax as the thing UK firms now have to manage. The software, the filings, the readiness checks, the quarterly cadence. The framing has been broadly procedural and consistent across the industry. The job is to keep up.
That framing has started to cost firms commercially.
Speaking at a recent Accountancy Age and Intuit QuickBooks Leading Voice Broadcast, Ryan Diplexcito, Partner at Johnston Carmichael, offered a sharper reframe of what is happening underneath the MTD conversation. “Rather than catalyst, it is probably an accelerant. A lot of the advisory work has been going on for a number of years now.”
The distinction matters more than the language suggests. A catalyst starts something new. An accelerant speeds up something already moving. Treating MTD as the catalyst implies the work begins with the legislation. Treating MTD as the accelerant implies the work was already underway, and the legislation is now compressing the timeline.
That language choice carries commercial weight that most firms have not yet calculated. Firms inheriting MTD as additional compliance work are pricing four quarterly client touchpoints on the same logic that priced the annual return. The workload is heavier across the year and profitability is not keeping pace. Diplexcito put it directly during the broadcast: “I suspect in a lot of cases, this MTD work is at a lower margin. It is using up resource that probably could be better used elsewhere.”
What sits underneath that observation is a structural opportunity for any firm willing to read the shift correctly. The four quarterly touchpoints become scheduled moments to deliver forward-looking advice and reposition the firm’s value around insight rather than filings.
There is also a shift happening on the client side. Diplexcito described an electrician client whose practice had recently moved onto the Intuit platform for MTD. “He is so engaged with how his finances sit just now. He is wanting to have more conversations. He is looking, how can I grow? How can I increase my profits? He is asking all the questions we want.”
That is the commercial opportunity sitting inside MTD, and it is the one most firms are missing while they focus on the filing side. The clients coming into this cadence for the first time are arriving more financially sophisticated and more engaged. They are the firms’ future advisory base. The question for any partner is whether the firm has built the pricing structure to capture that, or whether it is still billing the quarterly work at compliance rates.
Anthony Levene, Senior Professional Services Consultant at Intuit QuickBooks, reinforced the operational shift this represents. The MTD touchpoints, in his framing, become advisory conversations rather than data gathering exercises. The firms that move now will be the ones setting the terms of the conversation around how the quarterly cadence gets priced.
If MTD is the accelerant of a shift that was already underway, the readiness conversation is already too narrow. The question for any firm right now is how to price what the new cadence makes possible. Firms still reading MTD as a compliance project are absorbing the new workload at lower margin. Firms reading it as the moment to rebuild the commercial logic are using the same cadence to reposition the entire client relationship around insight.
The accelerant framing puts the commercial question where it belongs. The pricing model behind the work is now the variable that matters.
