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

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

From embracing automation and optimising workflows to MTD for Income Tax’s start, there are a number of ways to position your practice for its 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 cover:

New legislation changes for the 2026/27 tax year

There’s quite a few changes happening as the 2026/27 tax year gets underway, many of which will affect your practice, and your small business and self-employed clients.

Here’s a summary of the financial changes you need to be aware of that came into force in April 2026 (you can get a full update in our new tax year article):

• Making Tax Digital for Income Tax: It’s arrived for the first £50,000+ tranche. We surely don’t need to tell you any more than that. Our final countdown playbook is essential reading at this stage. But we also suggest you read our guides to managing the workload while keeping healthy:
• Statutory Sick Pay (SSP): There are three main changes. First, the three-day waiting period is gone. SSP is now payable from day one of sickness absence. Second, the Lower Earnings Limit—that was £125 per week—has been scrapped entirely for SSP eligibility. Third, for lower-paid employees, the new SSP rate will be whichever is lower: 80% of average weekly earnings or the flat rate of £123.25.
• Statutory parenting pay: The weekly cap for statutory maternity pay, paternity pay, shared parental pay, adoption pay, parental bereavement pay, and neonatal care pay rises from £187.18 to £194.32 from 6 April 2026.
• Small Employers Relief: From 6 April 2026, the rate of compensation will increase from 8.5% to 9%. Employers who qualify for Small Employers Relief will therefore be able to reclaim 109% from HMRC.
• Minimum wages: From 1 April 2026, the National Living Wage for those aged 21 and over rises from £12.21 to £12.71 per hour, a ~4.1% increase. The rate for 18–20-year-olds rises to £10.85 per hour, and the rate for 16–17-year-olds and eligible apprentices increases to £8.00 per hour.
• Employers’ National Insurance: No change from 2025: the rate increased from 13.8% to 15% on 6 April 2025, and the threshold that employers start paying National Insurance contributions (NICs) dropped from £9,100 to £5,000 per year.
• Business Asset Disposal Relief: The Capital Gains Tax rate on gains qualifying for Business Asset Disposal Relief (BADR) increases from 14% to 18% from 6 April 2026. The lifetime limit remains capped at £1 million.
• Business rates: From 1 April 2026, qualifying RHL properties with rateable values under £500,000 will benefit from permanently lower business rates multipliers, set 5p below the national rate. Pubs and live music venues get an additional 15% relief on top during 2026/27, with their bills then frozen in real terms for the following two years.

Refresh your processes for the new tax year

MTD is changing everything, of course, and we’ve examined this in several recent articles that aim to guide accounting professionals right up to the April deadline:

You can also filter by our MTD tag for accountants, and see all our coverage (of which there is a lot)

However, the broader picture is clear: now is the perfect time for you to review your practice processes and identify ways to make them more efficient, so you can provide more value to your clients.

From re-engaging your clients to highlighting the benefits of digital record-keeping, and upskilling your staff, there is plenty you can do to ensure you set your practice up for success.

Below, we cover these in more detail.

Review, reprice and re-engage your clients

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

You need to establish a strategy.

It’s important to reconnect with your existing clients at the start of the new tax year for several reasons:

• Understanding your clients’ goals for the upcoming year will help you align your services with their needs. You may also be able to upsell your offerings
• You can discuss scope and pricing changes
• You can advise them on how to deal with relevant legislation changes
• Acquiring new clients is expensive. A new client can cost you five times more than retaining an existing client.

When setting new prices, applying a fixed percentage increase across the board may be the fastest approach. But without first reviewing the profitability of your clients, you won’t know if it’s effective.

It’s worth taking the time to review your client fees and then organise your client list into three categories:

• Profitable clients
• Breakeven clients
• Clients who are losing you money.

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

It can be difficult to have a pricing conversation with an unprofitable client as their fees may need to be raised significantly, but the fact is even if you lose these clients, you will still be better off.

When you can centre the conversation around the value your practice can provide to the client, most clients will be happy to pay more for that value.

If you do receive pushback on your price increases, lay out some different options for your client, such as:

• Keeping your current price and reducing the scope of work
• Reimagining the scope of work and updating the pricing to reflect that.

Showcase the benefits of digital record-keeping to clients

Moving your clients to digital record-keeping is beneficial all-round.

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

By kicking off these discussions at the start of the tax year, you have time to train up your clients and iron out any issues without the stress of approaching tax deadlines.

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

• 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 compliance with tax regulations, 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 promptly. Cloud-based platforms also enable seamless sharing of documents and collaboration in real time, regardless of location (which is particularly useful for remote workers).
• Digital record-keeping systems can scale with clients’ businesses as they grow. Digital solutions offer the flexibility to meet changing needs whether clients are expanding operations, adding new locations, or increasing transaction volumes.

As an example, clients who work under the Construction Industry Scheme (CIS) often overpay tax and wait to receive an income tax refund once their return has been processed.

There’s a big incentive for these clients to move to digital bookkeeping where they can capture income and expenses simply, file their Self Assessment tax return early, and ultimately get their refunds faster.

Automate processes to make your practice more efficient

Automating processes allows you to take your attention off tedious manual tasks and free up valuable time for more strategic activities.

Sage’s MTD Agent applies agentic AI right where you need it most right now. We’ve discussed this in a couple of recent blogs that should be considered essential reading:

More generally, accounting software can remove the need for data entry by integrating with bank feeds, invoices, and expense receipts. This means transactions can be automatically imported, categorised, and reconciled with minimal intervention.

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

By automating tasks early in the tax year you can take advantage of efficient workflows and streamline operations from the outset.

To assess what areas your practice could automate, work out where your team is spending the most time:

• If you have to manually copy over figures from clients’ ledgers to tax preparation software, you could implement integrated accounting and tax software that talk to each other.
• If you are wading through shoeboxes of receipts, you could implement expense management tools to track expenses and allow clients to snap photos of their receipts and upload them instantly.
• If tracking billable time is proving time-consuming, you can bring in invoicing software that tracks your time and helps you create and send client invoices efficiently.

Upskill and support your practice team

The new tax year is an ideal time to reassess your team’s development needs and take the time to upskill while everyone has a lighter workload.

Investing in ongoing development not only helps to grow your practice and your team’s skill sets, but means you can operate more efficiently too.

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

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

And while this is important for daily work, there are also more general skills that help accountants serve their clients better, including soft skills, cloud accounting, time management and customer service.

Final thoughts on preparing for the 2026/27 tax year

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

It’s the perfect time to reflect on your processes, reconnect with your clients and consider new ways of working that will invigorate your team.

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