MTD ITSA HELP & FAQ

HMRC now require self employed etc

Unlike MTD VAT which is quarterly, each ITSA Return you submit must be from the Tax Year Start to your chosen Period End.
Every ITSA Return you submit effectively overwrites your previous Returns in that year
You could do an ITSA Return every day if you wished, but practically, most people are going to submit 4 Returns in a year in a similar way to MTD VAT

The sheet is split into 4 sections:
1) Basic Details
2) Income
3) Consolidated Expenses
4) Detailed Expenses

You should only ever link your expense figures into section 3 OR section 4, not both.
As at April 2025 you may do a 3 box return using section 3 if your total income is less than £90,000.

Basic Details

If you login with your National Insurance Number and select one of the 'Start Return' buttons, these details will be pre-filled for you.
If you download one of our macro-enabled sheets, you will need to enter these details manually

• Name : The company trading name. This is used to link to the correct business obligation and is not sent to HMRC.
• NINO : Your National Insurance Number. This must match the GOV.UK login credentials when you are asked to login.
• Period Start : dd/mm/yyyy. Usually the first day of the tax year, but can be the period start of a quarterly obligation, depending on your settings.
• Period End : dd/mm/yyyy. Usually the last day of a quarterly obligation, depending on your settings, but can be any date up to today.
• E-Mail Address : The email address you want your return confirmation and receipt sending to. After completing a return you can also send to other addresses too.

Income

• Turnover : the period total turnover from your self-employment business.
• Other : the period total of any other business income.
• Tax Taken Off Trading Income : If you have had any tax taken off by a contractor (NOT CIS) enter the total here. You will be able to see any CIS payments that have been made by your contractors by checking your Tax Calculations after logging in to our website ITSA page.

Consolidated Expenses

• Expenses : the period total of all allowable business expenses.

Detailed Expenses

The expenses section has 2 columns. The first column is for your total expenses in that category, the second column is for the part of the total that is allowable as an expense to this company.
eg. If you pay £180 per year for your mobile phone and use it equally for work and personally, you might enter £180 in column 1 and £90 in column 2.

• Cost Of Goods : stock bought for sale or use in the business
• Payments To Subcontractors :
• Wages And Staff Costs :
• Car and Van Travel Expenses :
• Premises Running Costs :
• Maintenance Costs :
• Admin Costs :
• Business Entertainment Costs :
• Advertising Costs :
• Interest On Bank and Other Loans :
• Finance Charges :
• Irrecoverable Debts :
• Professional Fees :
• Depreciation :
• Other Expenses :

The sheet is split into 5 sections:
1) Basic Details
2) Income
3) General Expenses
4) Consolidated Expenses
5) Detailed Expenses

You should only ever link your expense figures into section 4 OR section 5, not both.
As at April 2025 you should only use section 4, Consolidated Expenses, if your total income is less than £90,000.

Basic Details

If you login with your National Insurance Number and select one of the 'Start Return' buttons, these details will be pre-filled for you.
If you download one of our macro-enabled sheets, you will need to enter these details manually

• Name : The company trading name. This is used to link to the correct business obligation and is not sent to HMRC.
• NINO : Your National Insurance Number. This must match the GOV.UK login credentials when you are asked to login.
• Period Start : dd/mm/yyyy. Usually the first day of the tax year, but can be the period start of a quarterly obligation, depending on your settings.
• Period End : dd/mm/yyyy. Usually the last day of a quarterly obligation, depending on your settings, but can be any date up to today.
• E-Mail Address : The email address you want your return confirmation and receipt sending to. After completing a return you can also send to other addresses too.

Income

• Premiums Of Lease Grant :
• Reverse Premiums :
• Period Amount :
• Tax Deducted :
• Other Income :
• Rent A Room Rents Received :

General Expenses

These can be used together with both Consolidated and Detailed Expenses.

• Residential Financial Costs :
• Residential Financial Costs Carried Forward :
• Rent A Room Amount Claimed :

Consolidated Expenses

• Consolidated Expenses : the period total of all allowable business expenses.

Detailed Expenses

• Premises Running Costs :
• Repairs And Maintenance :
• Financial Costs :
• Professional Fees :
• Cost Of Services :
• Other :
• Travel Costs :

The spreadsheet is split into 5 sections on mutliple sheets:
1) Basic Details
2) Income
3) General Expenses
4) Consolidated Expenses
5) Detailed Expenses

You should only ever link your expense figures into section 4 OR section 5, not both.
As at April 2025 you should only use section 4, Consolidated Expenses, if your total income is less than £90,000.

Basic Details

This secion is on the first sheet.
If you login with your National Insurance Number and select one of the 'Start Return' buttons, these details will be pre-filled for you.
If you download one of our macro-enabled sheets, you will need to enter these details manually

• Name : The company trading name. This is used to link to the correct business obligation and is not sent to HMRC.
• NINO : Your National Insurance Number. This must match the GOV.UK login credentials when you are asked to login.
• Period Start : dd/mm/yyyy. Usually the first day of the tax year, but can be the period start of a quarterly obligation, depending on your settings.
• Period End : dd/mm/yyyy. Usually the last day of a quarterly obligation, depending on your settings, but can be any date up to today.
• E-Mail Address : The email address you want your return confirmation and receipt sending to. After completing a return you can also send to other addresses too.

Country

• Country Code : The 3 character ISO country code. A good source of these is Wikipedia

Income

• Rent Amount :
• Premiums Of Lease Grant :
• Other Property Income :

Tax Paid

• Foreign Tax Credit Relief :
• Foreign Tax Paid Or Deducted :
• Special Withholding Tax Or UK Tax Paid :

General Expenses

These can be used together with both Consolidated and Detailed Expenses.

• Residential Financial Costs :
• Residential Financial Costs Carried Forward :
• Rent A Room Amount Claimed :

Consolidated Expenses

• Consolidated Expenses : the period total of all allowable business expenses.

Detailed Expenses

• Premises Running Costs :
• Repairs And Maintenance :
• Financial Costs :
• Professional Fees :
• Cost Of Services :
• Other :

We now have an alternative to the old method of enabling Macros and using the 'File MY VAT Return' button in our downloadable bridging spreadsheets

As before, you still need to link your VAT figures from your spreadsheet to ours as explained in our User Guide.

Once you are ready to submit your return:
1. Save our spreadsheet.
2. Open our Uploads page by clicking here.
3. Drag the spreadsheet into the upload box, or click the box to select the speadsheet file.

To make the upload as easy as possible, there are also Upload boxes on the Downloads page and VAT Payers page.

Microsoft and others have made an update which sets the default state to block all macros and possibly to totally block access to new spreadsheets.

You can enable access and macros for the newly downloaded spreadsheet using the notes below
OR
Avoid macro issues by UPLOADING our spreadsheet.
Please see our FAQ (above) titled "How does the NEW Upload option work?"

To fix macro issues, you may need to make one or both of the following changes.

1. If you are not being prompted to 'Enable Macros' or 'Enable Content'.
In Excel:
Click the 'file' option on the menu, then bottom left on the 'options' link.
Choose 'Trust Center', then 'Trust Center Settings' then 'Macro Settings' then choose the 'Disable all macros with notification' option.
Next time you open our spreadsheet, you should be prompted to enable content (macros).
In OpenOffice:
Click the 'Tools' menu option, then 'Options'.
In the list on the left, choose 'Security' and then 'Macro Security'.
On the 'Security level' tab choose the 'medium' setting and click 'ok' at the bottom of the dialog box.
Next time you open our spreadsheet, you should be prompted to enable macros.

2. If you see a red 'SECURITY RISK' banner across the top of our spreadsheet.
You will need to UNBLOCK ACCESS to our spreadsheet.
Open Windows File Explorer (Win+E is the shortcut), find the spreadsheet you downloaded from us (normally in your 'downloads' folder), right click the file and choose 'properties'. At the bottom of the 'General' tab on the properties popup you should have a 'security' option with an 'unblock' tick box.

You can use the notes below to fix the problem
OR
Avoid macro issues by UPLOADING our spreadsheet.
Please see our FAQ (above) titled "How does the NEW Upload option work?"

No response from the "File My ITSA Return" button is always one of three things.
1) You have macros disabled.
They need to be enabled for our buttons to work. To fix, save your spreadsheet (as a .xlsm file) and when you re-open it, click the 'enable editing' button and then click the 'enable macros' or 'enable active content' button (both are usually shown just below the toolbar). Please note that saving our spreadsheet as .xls or .xlsx will stop all of our buttons from working.
2) Your excel is in 'design mode'.
if this is true then clicking the button should show a border or resize blobs around the button. To fix, go to the 'developer' tab and click on the design mode icon to switch it off.
3) You have saved our spreadsheet as a .xls or .xlsx file.
If you save our spreadsheet as anything other than a macro enabled .xlsm file, Excel will remove the macros behind the buttons that are needed to make our software work correctly. The only fix is to download another spreadsheet from our website.

If you are having problems, then the simplest test of our spreadsheet is to download a new spreadsheet from:
Go to Downloads Page
Open it, enable macros, tick the declare box and Click the 'File My VAT Return' button.
Your browser should open on our confirm page, complaining about missing data. You can then close the browser tab and start linking your VAT figures to our spreadsheet.
If your browser does not open, then please Contact Us and we help to resolve the problem.

Yes, HMRC have explicitly said that recording businesses records digitally can be recorded in Excel spreadsheets providing that they are digitally linked. In order for a spreadsheet to be complaint with MTD, the initial input of the data in the first instance can be inputted manually. Any further transfer, recapture or modification of that data must be done using digital links. A digital link in this instance would simply be a formula linking a cell from one sheet to another. The use of copying and pasting, or manually creating a ITSA return is not compliant with MTD ITSA.

Anyone and everyone, originally devised for small businesses that used paper or spreadsheet to manage their accounts, we have farmers, barristers, engineers, tourist attractions even pension companies and software houses.

We are fully recognised by HMRC as a bridging supplier and are listed as CHM ITSA Bridge on the HMRC site directory

Issues at HMRC

 

Yes, we are recognised by HMRC , the solution is listed in the bridging section and is CHM ITSA Bridge which links to https://www.chm-software.co.uk

Our solution comprises 2 distinct elements

• A Spreadsheet (Excel, Open Office, LibreOffice)
• A web portal which allows you to logon and submit to HMRC in an MTD compliant way

We have 3 business models

• Individual Businesses submitting their own returns (£8.50 + VAT per return) payable by Card or Paypal ) on each submission
• Agents and Bookkeepers submitting on their clients behalf (£1.25 + VAT  per return subject to a minimum £10.00 + VAT per calendar month payable by direct debit )
• Charities, unable to pay by card or paypal (£8.50 + VAT per return) payable by direct debit on the month after each submission

Our bridging software is FREE to download and integrate with any Excel spreadsheet for both MAC and Microsoft. The filing of the ITSA return with HMRC will cost £8.50 + VAT per submission. Payment will be made via a typical online checkout page during the submission process.

The security and privacy of your data is of paramount importance to us, all transmissions from our MTD compliant VAT Add-in are secure using the latest HTTPS protocols with the highest levels of encryption, we use the HMRC to authenicate all our customers, so we do not store or share any of your private information. Payments are taken via 3rd party payment provider (Braintree). Braintree is a Paypal company and is a PCI level 1 provider , payment may be made via Paypal accounts or using debit or credit card, all payments PCI DSS compliant and we never get to know or hold any of your payment details, your payments are also protected by Paypal buyer guarantee.

The fields that you complete or link through to our bridging sheet are the only figures that are passed to HMRC.

Download for Free our MTD VAT add-in. If you operate on a quarterly VAT scheme then we advise you integrate 4 of our free add-ins per 12-month period (12 for monthly VAT returns). Simply link up the box 1,2,4,6,7,8 & 9 in each add-in to your VAT calculations sheets for each period, detail each period start and end date and you are ready to go!

If you signed up and gave HMRC the Application ID of a different MTD ITSA system, it does not matter.
During our ITSA submission process you will be taken to login to GOV.UK and give permission for our software to process your return.
Our company name is CHM Software Limited and our HMRC Application ID is CHM ITSA BRIDGE