MTD Knowledge Base

Receipt photos and MTD: what HMRC actually requires

The short answer

No. HMRC does not require you to scan, photograph or upload individual receipts and invoices for Making Tax Digital.

What has to be digital is the record of each transaction: the amount, the date, and the category. That's it. Three pieces of information, created and stored in software that works with Making Tax Digital.

If plenty of apps have told you otherwise, that's worth knowing about — the companies selling scanning have an interest in the myth.

But you still have to keep the receipts

Here's the part the short answer leaves out, and it matters more than the headline.

HMRC guidance is explicit: you must continue keeping records the way you normally do for Self Assessment. You still need the original records or supporting documents — bank statements, invoices, receipts — that you used to prepare your return.

And you need to keep them for at least five years after the 31 January submission deadline for that tax year.

So the obligation isn't photograph everything. The obligation is still have it in five years if HMRC asks.

Which is where paper becomes the problem

A thermal till receipt from a builders' merchant is unreadable long before five years are up. Anyone who has emptied a bag of receipts in January knows what a two-year-old fuel receipt looks like: a blank slip of shiny paper.

Photographing a receipt isn't a legal requirement. It's just the only realistic way of meeting a legal requirement that lasts five years, using paper that lasts about two.

You can keep the paper in a folder if you prefer, and HMRC is perfectly happy with that. It just has to still say something when someone reads it.

Is any of this new?

No — and this is worth being clear about, because a lot of the noise around MTD implies otherwise.

The requirement to keep supporting documents for five years existed long before Making Tax Digital. Nothing about that has changed.

What MTD added is narrower than most people think: the record itself — amount, date, category — now has to be digital, and created in compatible software. The supporting document behind it can stay on paper.

Good news most people haven't heard: you may not need categories at all

Buried in the same guidance is something that makes this far less work than people expect.

If your turnover from a source of self-employment is under £90,000, you can use simpler categorisation. For a sole trader that means you only need to record whether a transaction is income or an expense. Not fuel, not tools, not office costs — just in or out.

Two things to watch. If you receive UK residential property income, you have to go one step further and record whether an expense is a restricted finance cost. And if your turnover later reaches £90,000, you'll need to categorise that source in full — including records from the start of that tax year — before you can send a quarterly update.

If you're unsure whether you'll cross the threshold, categorise in full from the start. Redoing a year of records is worse than doing it properly once.

Two more rules worth knowing

Several businesses means several sets of records. If you have more than one sole trader business, each one needs its own digital records and its own quarterly updates. An electrician who also does driving instruction keeps two sets, not one.

Property works differently: all your UK properties count as a single UK property business, so no separate records per property. Foreign properties are the exception — those need separate records for each one.

No copying and pasting between programs. Once a digital record has been sent to HMRC in a quarterly update, you must not manually move it — no retyping it into another cell or another program, no cut and paste. If you use more than one piece of software, they have to be digitally linked.

This one catches people who keep records in a spreadsheet and then type the totals into something else. That's exactly what the rule prohibits.

So what should you actually do?

Keep it simple:

Record the amount, the date and (if your turnover requires it) the category, as close to the transaction as you can. Keep the receipt or invoice behind it — paper or digital, your choice — for five years. Make sure it'll still be readable when that five years is up.

For anything specific to your own situation, ask your accountant or check GOV.UK. We don't give tax advice, and a website can't see your books.

Where TidGo fits

TidGo exists for the second half of that: receipts and income proof captured as they happen, so the evidence is still there in five years and your accountant isn't working from a bag of blank paper.

We're telling you HMRC doesn't require photos even though photos are what we do, because the honest version of the argument is the better one. The paper fades. That's reason enough.

TidGo doesn't submit anything to HMRC and it isn't tax advice. It collects and tidies records so that whoever does your submission has something clean to work from.