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For small accountancy practices

When a landlord or a sole trader needs an accountant, do they find your practice?

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax is now reaching sole traders and landlords in three waves. About a third of the first wave had not registered by August. Some of them may be looking for help.

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Free, with no sign-up. It takes a minute or two, and we only read pages anyone can see.

How many have signed up

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax began in April 2026 for sole traders and landlords with income over £50,000. By August, this many had registered.

  • Expected to need itabout 864,000
  • Registered570,000
  • Not registered yetabout 294,000
Sole traders and landlords, first wave, August 2026.

From September, HMRC said it would start signing up the people who had not registered. It writes to them directly, and their accountant gets no copy.

How people look for help now

Your next client may start with a search, a review or a chatbot. These are the figures we could check, with who asked.

When it reaches your clients

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax arrives in three steps. Each step is a group of sole traders and landlords who have to send HMRC updates every quarter.

  1. April 2026

    Income over £50,000

    The first wave. This is the group HMRC is now writing to.

  2. April 2027

    Income over £30,000

    The second wave.

  3. April 2028

    Income over £20,000

    The third wave: sole traders and landlords measured on the 2026 to 2027 tax year.

Each date is the start of a tax year.

Who you are up against

Almost 40,000 practices. Four in five have fewer than five employees, so the local search is mostly against small practices.

  • 31,665 (79%) No employees, or one to four
  • 4,770 (12%) Five to nine
  • 2,090 (5%) Ten to nineteen
  • 1,450 (4%) Twenty or more
UK accountancy enterprises by number of employees, March 2025: 39,975 in total, 30,575 of them accounting and auditing.

The rules around your website

What ICAEW and ACCA expect of how a practice advertises, and the supervision every practice must have.

  • Truthful, clear, and within the ASA’s rules

    ICAEW firms must make sure every advertisement, websites and letterheads included, complies with the law and the Advertising Standards Authority’s requirements: legal, decent, honest, truthful and clear.

    ICAEW: marketing and advertising helpsheet

  • Comparisons must be objective and verifiable

    A claim to give a better service than another firm is not acceptable, even if it is true. Any comparison must be objective, about the same services, and verifiable.

    ICAEW: marketing and advertising helpsheet

  • Be careful with “leading”

    Words like “leading” or “most widely used” need the greatest caution. A website can easily make a small practice look bigger than it is.

    ICAEW: marketing and advertising helpsheet

  • Chartered Certified Accountants: ACCA’s conditions

    An ACCA-regulated firm may use the term only if at least half its principals are ACCA members with practising certificates, controlling 51% or more of the votes. Firms that fall short must apply to ACCA for permission. A domain name may not contain the protected terms either.

    ACCA: business name and use of logo

  • Anti-money-laundering supervision

    Every accountancy service provider in the UK must be supervised for anti-money-laundering purposes, by a professional body or by HMRC. Trading without it can lead to a penalty or prosecution.

    GOV.UK: money laundering regulations, who needs to register

We don’t check these rules for you. Read them on ICAEW’s and ACCA’s sites, and check your own pages against them.

Five minutes on your own phone

You can see most of what a new client sees without anyone’s help.

  • Search for yourself

    On your phone, search “accountant” and your town, then “accountant for landlords” and “accountant for sole traders” and your town. Who is above you?

  • Look for Making Tax Digital

    Is there a page that tells a landlord or a sole trader what it means for them, and what you do about it?

  • Open your Google listing

    Check your hours, services and photos. Count your reviews and look at the date of the newest. Are they answered?

  • Ask ChatGPT, three times

    Ask “Which accountant in your town should I use for a rental property?” three separate times. Answers vary, so count how often your practice is named.

  • Make an enquiry yourself

    Fill in your own contact form at six in the evening. How long until you get an answer?

Or let us do it: type your website address into the free check, and the report shows who comes up above you, whether ChatGPT names you, and what is holding your site back. Run the free check.

What we do about it, for a practice

We check your website every week, tell you in plain English what is costing you enquiries, and make the fixes you say yes to. We also check each month what ChatGPT says about you.

Nothing changes without your yes. We never promise a place on Google, or that ChatGPT will name you. How it works · Pricing

Start with a free check.

See what’s holding your site back, and whether ChatGPT names you, in a minute or two. Then we can look after it for you: £49 a month + VAT at 20% for our first 20 customers, fixed for a year.

Check my site, freeLook after my site
Where these numbers come from

Each figure was checked against the page named beside it on 14 October 2026. Where a company paid for a survey, the page says so. These are published figures, not ours: we show our own once we have checked enough sites.