Do it yourself, use a high-street accountant, or use us? It depends how complicated your tax is, and how much of your own time you want to spend on it.
Doing it yourself is cheapest, but under Making Tax Digital it means five filings a year. A high-street accountant costs more and usually wants a meeting. We do it all for £25 a month, with no meetings.
| Doing it yourself | Filed Tax | A high-street accountant | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Typical cost | Your time, plus software under Making Tax Digital | £25/month, first month free | Varies by firm and area |
| Who does the work | You | We do | They do |
| What you do | Everything | Answer our questions | Usually a meeting and a hand-over of records |
| Quarterly MTD updates | You file four | We file four | Usually included, ask |
| Someone to ask | HMRC helplines | Unlimited questions, by portal message or WhatsApp | Your accountant |
| Meetings | None | None | Usually |
| Suits | Simple affairs, confident filers | Any personal return — employment, self-employment, property, company dividends, foreign income, or a mix — for people who would rather not | Company accounts, VAT and payroll, and people who want a meeting |
If you have one income stream, you keep decent records, your turnover is comfortably below the VAT threshold and you are not frightened of the HMRC website, doing it yourself is fine and we would encourage it. HMRC's online return is free to use. The trading allowance means that if your gross trading income is £1,000 or less you may not need to file at all. Paying anyone £300 a year to do something that takes you an hour is not good value.
The thing that changes this calculation is Making Tax Digital. From April 2026 anyone with qualifying income over £50,000 files five times a year rather than once, with the quarterly updates due on 7 August, 7 November, 7 February and 7 May. One annual return you can handle. Five deadlines is a different kind of commitment, and the penalty regime for missing them is points-based.
If you need the company-level work done alongside your personal return — company accounts, Corporation Tax, VAT returns, payroll — or you want a face-to-face relationship with someone across a desk, use a local firm. We file personal returns, including a director's salary and dividends, foreign income and property abroad; we do not prepare company accounts, VAT or payroll, and we will say so rather than take the work.
You have a personal tax return to file — as an employee with extra income, a sole trader, a landlord, a company director, a minister, a locum, someone living abroad with UK income, or some mix of those. Your affairs are yours to deal with and you would rather they were not. You want someone who knows the deadlines, chases you before them rather than after, and files on time. You do not want a meeting, and you do not want to learn a new piece of software. That is what £25 a month buys.
We are not the cheapest option. Doing it yourself is cheaper. Filing software is cheaper than a filing service, because software makes you do the work. We charge for the work being done for you, and for a named accountant reviewing it before it goes.
We do not publish comparisons against named competitors, because prices and scopes change and a comparison that goes stale is worse than none. What we will say is: check whether a price you are quoted covers the quarterly updates as well as the annual return. Under Making Tax Digital that is the difference between one filing and five.
Yes. Tell us what has already been filed and we will pick up from there.
Yes. Tell us which parts you want us to take on and we will pick it up from there.
Yes. There is a page of this site devoted to exactly that.
If you have read this and think you should be doing it yourself, do that — and use our free guides, which are written for exactly that reader. If you would rather hand it over, £25 a month covers the whole year, five filings included.