Hammock raise ratchets up MTD landlord competition
A $5.5m funding round for UK property technology firm Hammock has further intensified the competition to capture the landlord market ahead of MTD ITSA mandation.
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Landlord software has never really taken off as its largely pointless given the low number of transactions.
Even if MTD finally arrives for landlords (excuse me whilst I laugh loudly) its hard to see how downloading a bank account and copying into excel will be slower given there would probably be no more than 10 figures to deal with a quarter, and might be as low as 3.
Totally agree
MTD is figures not pretty pictures
And only 2 figues a quarter, estimated at year start.
Filing no.5 is the only time that anything matters.
' the profession’s favourite tool – Microsoft Excel. For the smallest landlords just scraping over the mandation threshold of £10,000, where any additional cost is keenly felt, specialist software could be a tough sell.'
Agree
' For the rung above this, Hammock’s proposal to add value through its additional compliance solutions may be a real difference-maker.'
Disagree
Agreed, but I think offerings like this have a bigger issue ahead than that they're not going to be particularly valuable to many landlords who Hammock think MTD will allow them to attract.
I sign up to Hammock, I don't need any of it - that's why I pay agents to manage - but I need it to do my MTD submissions. So I'm [***] off, 60 quid a year to give HMRC some numbers. I'm doubly [***] off because, despite all the hype of connecting to my bank account and doing it all automatically, the numbers from my bank account are only useful to confirm that I've entered that months rent and expenses correctly.
And then I get to the end of the year and need to do the rest of my self assessment - and suddenly I discover that Hammock doesn't cover it, so now I'm going to have to (presumably pay) for yet another piece of software to do the EoY stuff, and as I keep harping on about, there's no guarantee that my new piece of software will be able to talk to Hammock. (Technically I don't think the new software does NEED to talk to hammock but if a different piece of software starts changing the submitted data underneath hammock then you're going to get into a battle where two different applications disagree on what should be submitted to HMRC so at the very least the two pieces of software have to cooperate, even if that's a "you don't touch mine, I won't touch yours" agreement)
Double the issues if you also have self employment income...
One final thought - it seems unlikely that any MTD capable software that can handle the EoY stuff won't be able to do the quarterly stuff too. On a purely technical basis, the quarterly submissions are the easy part.
I suspect that MTD capable offerings for accountants are likely to offer "quarterly submission workflows" for their clients for what is likely to be a small incremental cost (they'll be crazy if they don't even if it's just a portal to upload a small CSV/xlsx file to), which leaves the unrepresented taxpayer who will need software that can cover 100% of their particular SA case. Either way, I don't see MTD as being an important consideration for choosing Hammock.