Making tax digital where to start?

Fanny_Addams

Hi! I'm hoping for some help and advice please....
 We are a tiny business (picture framers) two of us in a partnership, not a limited company. Our business is very basic, materials in, manufacture, finished product out. We have no empolyees and don't import/export. We receive around 20 invoices a month and submit around 6. Our main income is from retail sales and orders. We don't sell online. We are VAT registered.
This is where my question comes in.... Up to now my partner has been keeping all our records in the big red book and we have paper records of everything. I've been buying software annually to submit our tax return. I'm no longer allowed to file our VAT return via the HMRC portal so need some advice please. If all our records now need to be digital Should I just get accounting software to cover everything?  A lot of the ones advertised seem to be a lot more complex than we need but I don't know where to start. 
Thanks for reading this far, any advice gratefully received. 

Jeremy535897

The first question is whether you need to be VAT registered. If your turnover is below £83,000 a year you can deregister. Unless your customers are VAT registered, I would have thought that you will be losing far more on sales by being VAT registered than you recover on purchases.

Having said that, with making tax digital for income tax self assessment for income tax expected in 2024 (or possibly 2025 for partnerships), one day you will have to do digital records. You can use Excel and bridging software, or use one of the relatively inexpensive cloud bookkeeping solutions like Freeagent, Quickbooks, Sage and Xero. Some like Quickfile say they are free, but other posters may have more experience of the various offerings available.

MobileSaver

Fanny_Addams said:

I'm no longer allowed to file our VAT return via the HMRC portal

To give you some breathing space you can use the free My Tax Digital web site which allows you to enter your VAT figures manually online like you always used to and it will electronically submit them to HMRC in the approved MTD format.

https://mytaxdigital.co.uk/#/

It's free, quick, simple and just works...