Four Times a Year, Forever

For about seven hundred years, the English Exchequer kept its accounts on sticks.

Notched lengths of hazel and willow, cut to record what had been paid in. The stick was then split down its length, so that the creditor kept one half and the Exchequer kept the other. Fit the two together and the notches either matched or they didn't. It was tamper-proof, portable, and required no literacy from anyone involved. The creditor's half was called the stock, which is where stockholders come from.

The system was finally abolished in 1826, leaving Whitehall with two cartloads of obsolete wooden sticks and no obvious use for them. Someone suggested giving them away as firewood. Officialdom preferred to dispose of them privately, and on 16 October 1834 the tallies were fed into the furnaces beneath the House of Lords. The flues overheated. The panelling caught. By morning the medieval Palace of Westminster was gone.

Yes, that fire. The one Turner painted.

Dickens later used the episode as his standing example of what happens when a bureaucracy would rather do a thing correctly than sensibly. It has never quite lost its usefulness as a parable.

The first one has already gone

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax came into force on 6 April 2026. The first quarterly deadline fell on 7 August, which means the Bar has now divided into two groups: those who filed something, and those who are about to discover they were supposed to.

The regime applies to self-employed individuals with qualifying income above £50,000. The threshold is measured on gross receipts, not profit, which is the detail that catches people. Chambers rent, clerks' fees, travel, none of it comes off before the test is applied. A junior with £90,000 of receipts and £30,000 of costs is comfortably inside the regime, whatever the eventual tax computation says.

For the commercial Bar, that means everybody.

What it requires is digital records kept throughout the year in software HMRC recognises, and four quarterly updates of income and expenditure. Spreadsheets alone no longer suffice unless they're connected through approved bridging software. The annual return doesn't disappear, it becomes a Final Declaration, and for 2026/27 that falls on 31 January 2028.

The next quarterly deadline is 7 November 2026, covering the period from 6 July to 5 October.

If you missed the first one

Two pieces of good news, and they're better than most people expect.

The updates are cumulative. Each one covers the whole period from 6 April to the end of the current quarter and restates what came before it, rather than reporting three months in isolation. So anything wrong in the first update gets corrected simply by filing the second one properly. There is no amendment process to navigate, because there is nothing to amend.

And 2026/27 is a soft-landing year. HMRC is not applying penalty points to late quarterly updates for this first cohort. From 2027/28 the points system operates properly, and four missed deadlines brings a £200 charge.

That is a year of grace, not an exemption. The soft landing covers the quarterly updates only. It does not extend to the Final Declaration.

The bit that's actually useful

Most of what's been written about MTD treats it as a compliance burden, which it is. But there's a second-order effect that matters more, and almost nobody at the Bar is set up to take advantage of it yet.

Four times a year, you will know where your profit actually is.

The self-employed Bar has historically operated with almost no in-year visibility. Receipts arrive when they arrive, aged debt does what aged debt does, and the true shape of a year tends to become clear somewhere around the following January, at which point every decision that could have been made about it has already been made by default.

Quarterly figures change that. Pension contributions can be sized against a profit figure you can see rather than one you're guessing at. If you're anywhere near the tapered annual allowance, and at a commercial set you may well be, knowing in November roughly where adjusted income is heading is worth considerably more than discovering it in arrears. Reserving for tax stops being a rule of thumb. Carry forward of unused allowance, which is the single most useful mechanism available to anyone with lumpy income, becomes something you can plan around rather than something you scramble to use before it expires.

None of that is what MTD was designed for. It's just what falls out of it.

Two dates worth putting somewhere now

The first is 7 November. That one is routine if your records are current and unpleasant if they aren't.

The second is the fortnight spanning the end of January 2027. The Self Assessment return for 2025/26 is due on 31 January, in the old style, because that year sits outside the new regime. The third quarterly update lands on 7 February. Seven days apart, in the part of the year when the accounting profession is least able to take your call.

If January is when the shoebox gets opened, both of those will hurt at once. If the bank account is reconciled monthly, neither will.

One thing not to forget

Your quarterly updates will show this year's trading. They will not show the slice of transition profit still landing on your return from the basis period reform of 2023/24.

If you had a 30 April year end, which most of the Bar did, that transition profit was spread across five tax years running to 2027/28. There's a slice in this year's return and a final one next year, arriving on top of a set of accounts that otherwise looks entirely ordinary. It's easy to miss, and it's large enough to push people over thresholds they thought they were clear of.

That's a subject in its own right, and it's the next thing we'll write about.

The Exchequer's tally sticks worked perfectly well for seven centuries. They were replaced anyway, and the replacement caused rather more disruption than anybody had budgeted for. The parallel isn't exact. But four times a year, forever, is a genuine change to the rhythm of a practice, and the people who get value out of it will be the ones who treat the new information as something to act on rather than something to file.

This article is general information based on tax legislation in force and on HMRC's stated timetable at the date of publication, both of which may change. Anyone within Making Tax Digital should take specific advice from an accountant familiar with the Bar's receipts basis.

Altor Wealth Management LLP advises barristers and other self-employed professionals from our offices in Hook, Hampshire, and across Surrey, Berkshire, Sussex and Kent.