Manage your practice’s default Income Tax settings for clients

This article explains how to set up default settings for your practice that control whether your clients can access the Income Tax in FreeAgent and make submissions.

Managing Income Tax access for clients

Select 'Settings' from the drop-down menu below your practice name.

Next, select ‘Tax submission and access control’ from the ‘My practice’ area.

Select the ‘Income Tax’ tab.

You can choose who can access the Income Tax area in FreeAgent, update clients’ Self Assessment and Making Tax Digital (MTD) for Income Tax submission settings, and automate quarterly update approvals and submissions.

Income Tax access

You can choose whether the Income Tax area in FreeAgent can be accessed by account managers only, account managers and clients with full (level 8) access, or account managers and clients with level 7 and 8 access.

Self Assessment settings

If you allow clients to access the Income Tax area, you can choose whether clients with full (level 8) access who need to complete old Self Assessment forms can make Self Assessment submissions themselves.

Please note that you won’t see this option if you set Income Tax access to account managers only.

MTD for Income Tax settings

For clients who need to complete MTD for Income Tax submissions, you can choose whether clients with full (level 8) access can make submissions for quarterly updates, end of year updates, and final declarations.

You can also choose which MTD for Income Tax submissions will require approvals. Read how to send MTD for Income Tax submissions to a client for approval.

Finally, you can choose whether or not to show the annual tax estimate in clients' accounts, which is provided by HMRC after each submission.

MTD for Income Tax quarterly approvals and submissions

To send clients' quarterly updates to HMRC automatically, select ‘Yes’ to ‘Send automated updates to HMRC’.

If approvals have been enabled for clients’ quarterly updates, you can choose to send the approval requests to clients automatically.

The automated submissions will only be sent once the client, or the account manager, has approved the update. However, you can choose to send the automated updates to HMRC without the clients' approval if you prefer.

Read more about automating clients’ quarterly MTD for Income Tax updates and approvals.

Email settings

If you choose to enable approvals, you can set up default contents for the emails. A default message will appear in the ‘Default email contents’ area but you can edit this text if you wish.

Once you’re happy with the default Income Tax settings, select ‘Save changes’ to complete the process.