How accountants and bookkeepers can welcome the new tax year with confidence

The start of a new tax year gives your practice an opportunity to set the stage for success.

From automating acceptance and optimizing workflows to MTD at the start of Income Tax, there are several ways to set up your most successful year yet.

In this article, we explore key steps and insights to help you lay a solid foundation for the 2026/27 tax year and empower your team to deliver exceptional service and drive growth.

Here’s what we’re up to:

New law changes for the 2026/27 tax year

There are a number of changes taking place as the 2026/27 tax year begins, many of which will affect your operations, as well as your small business and self-employed clients.

Here’s a summary of the tax changes you need to know that come into effect in April 2026 (you can find a full update in our new tax year article):

• Digitization of Income Tax: It came with a starting price of £50,000+. We don’t need to tell you more than that. Our final countdown book is essential reading at this stage. But we also suggest you read our guidelines for managing workload while being healthy:
• Statutory Sick Pay (SSP): There are three main changes. First, the three-day waiting period is gone. SSP is now paid from the first day of sickness absence. Second, the Minimum Wage Threshold—which used to be £125 a week—has been scrapped entirely to qualify for SSP. Third, for low-wage workers, the new SSP rate will be whichever is lower: 80% of average weekly earnings or the lower rate of £123.25.
• Statutory parental pay: The weekly cap for statutory maternity pay, paternity pay, shared parenting pay, adoption pay, bereavement pay, and childcare pay increases from £187.18 to £194.32 from 6 April 2026.
• Help for Small Employers: From 6 April 2026, the compensation rate will increase from 8.5% to 9%. Employers who qualify for Small Employer Help will be able to claim back 109% from HMRC.
• Minimum wage: From 1 April 2026, the National Living Wage for those aged 21 and over rises from £12.21 to £12.71 an hour, an increase of 4.1%. The rate for 18-20 year olds rises to £10.85 an hour, while the rate for 16-17 year olds and qualified students rises to £8.00 an hour.
• Employers’ National Insurance: No change from 2025: the rate rises from 13.8% to 15% on 6 April 2025, and the threshold for employers to start paying National Insurance contributions (NICs) drops from £9,100 to £5,000 a year.
• Business Asset Disposal Assistance: The Capital Gains Tax rate on gains eligible for Business Asset Disposal Relief (BADR) increases from 14% to 18% from 6 April 2026. The lifetime limit remains at £1 million.
• Business values: From 1 April 2026, eligible RHL properties with rateable values ​​below £500,000 will benefit from the lowest ever business rates multiplier, set 5p below the national average. Pubs and live music venues get 15% more relief in 2026/27, with their bills frozen in real terms for the next two years.

Update your procedures for the new tax year

MTD changes everything, of course, and we’ve explored this in several recent articles aimed at guiding accountants until the April deadline:

You can also filter by our MTD tag for accountants, and see all our entries (many of them)

However, the bigger picture is clear: now is a good time to review your practice processes and identify ways to make them more efficient, so you can offer more value to your customers.

From re-engaging your clients to highlighting the benefits of digital record keeping, and upskilling your employees, there’s a lot you can do to ensure you’re setting yourself up for success.

Below, we cover these in detail.

Review, rate and re-engage your clients

Retaining clients is essential to running a successful and sustainable practice, but you can’t rely on it happening automatically.

You need to come up with a strategy.

It is important to reconnect with your existing customers at the start of the new tax year for several reasons:

• Understanding your customers’ goals for the coming year will help you align your services to their needs. You can also sell your donations
• You can discuss the range and price changes
• You can advise them on how to deal with relevant regulatory changes
• Acquiring new customers is expensive. A new client can cost you five times more than keeping an existing client.

When setting new prices, using a fixed percentage increase across the board may be the fastest method. But without first reviewing the benefits of your customers, you won’t know if it’s working.

It’s a good idea to take the time to review your client finances and organize your client list into three categories:

• Profitable clients
• Breakeven clients
• Clients lose money.

This way you can take an individual approach to each group.

It can be difficult to have a price negotiation with an unprofitable customer as their fees may need to be increased significantly, but the truth is that even if you lose these customers, you will still be better off.

If you can focus the conversation on the value your practice can provide the client, most clients will be happy to pay more for that value.

If you receive a pushback on your price increase, give your client different options, such as:

• Maintaining your current price and reducing the scope of work
• Rethinking the scope of work and revising prices to reflect that.

Demonstrate the benefits of digital recordkeeping to clients

Moving your clients to digital record keeping has benefits everywhere.

It will save you and your clients practice time and free you up to provide more value-added services.

By starting these discussions early in the tax year, you have time to train your clients and fix any issues without the stress of approaching tax deadlines.

Here are a few points you can raise with your customers:

• They will be able to streamline their bookkeeping processes, automate repetitive tasks, and access information quickly, allowing them to focus more on core business activities.
• Digital systems can improve accuracy and ensure tax compliance, using automated calculations and built-in validation checks.
• Digital record keeping provides clients with real-time insights into their financial performance and means they can make informed decisions quickly. Cloud-based platforms also enable seamless document sharing and real-time collaboration, regardless of location (especially useful for remote workers).
• Digital record keeping systems can scale with clients’ businesses as they grow. Digital solutions provide the flexibility to meet changing needs whether clients are expanding operations, adding new locations, or increasing purchase volumes.

For example, clients working under the Construction Industry Scheme (CIS) often pay excess tax and wait to receive an income tax refund once their return has been processed.

There is a huge incentive for these clients to move to digital bookkeeping where they can capture income and expenses easily, submit their Self-Assessment tax return early, and ultimately receive their refund quickly.

Organize processes to make your practice more efficient

Automating processes allows you to divert your attention from tedious manual tasks and free up valuable time for more strategic tasks.

MTD Agent for Sage uses agent AI right where you need it most right now. We have discussed this in a few recent blogs that should be taken seriously:

In general, accounting software can eliminate the need for data entry by including bank statements, invoices, and expense receipts. This means transactions can be automatically entered, categorized, and consolidated with minimal intervention.

For example, AutoEntry by Sage is an AI-powered tool that captures data from images of receipts and invoices and automatically uploads it to Sage Accounting.

By automating tasks at the beginning of the tax year you can take advantage of efficient workflows and streamline tasks from the start.

To test which areas your practice can automate, find out where your team spends the most time:

• If you have to manually copy calculations from client ledgers to tax preparation software, you can use integrated accounting and tax software that speaks for itself.
• When walking through receipts shoeboxes, you can use expense management tools to track expenses and allow customers to take pictures of their receipts and upload them quickly.
• If tracking billable time proves time-consuming, you can bring in invoicing software that tracks your time and helps you create and send client invoices efficiently.

Develop skills and support your practice team

The new tax year is the perfect time to reassess your team’s development needs and give yourself time to develop skills while everyone has a lighter workload.

Investing in continuous development not only helps you grow your practice and your team’s skill set, but it means you can work more effectively too.

In addition to providing access to external courses such as workshops and conferences, don’t forget that it may be useful to facilitate cross-training opportunities within the practice team.

Development covers a wide area, but it would be easy for accountants to focus only on developing core technical knowledge.

And while this is important in day-to-day work, there are also general skills that help accountants better serve their clients, including soft skills, cloud computing, time management and customer service.

Final thoughts on preparing for the 2026/27 tax year

To continue growing your practice, you need to approach the new tax year as an opportunity to learn and adapt.

It’s a great time to rethink your processes, reconnect with your customers and consider new ways of working that will empower your team.

Reaching out to customers at this time allows you to reaffirm your commitment to providing exceptional service, address any concerns or changes in circumstances, and plan strategies for the coming year.