Frequently Asked Questions

AxiomaBooks is a bookkeeping, invoicing, and VAT-filing app for UK freelancers and small businesses — built by Axioma Technologies, the team behind Axioma Pay and LocalTask.

Starter covers core bookkeeping, invoicing, and VAT export. Growth adds OCR receipt capture, cash flow forecasting, accountant access, and more reports. Complete adds native in-app HMRC Making Tax Digital VAT filing and the full report set. See the Plans section on the homepage for current pricing.

Every plan can produce an MTD-ready VAT export you can submit through any HMRC-recognised bridging tool. On the Complete plan, AxiomaBooks connects directly to HMRC’s Making Tax Digital API, so you can review your VAT obligations and submit your return without leaving the app.

Every invoice can include a secure Pay Now button powered by Axioma Pay, AxiomaBooks' own payment integration — there's no separate payment gateway to set up. Payment links stay valid for one month and only ever ask for what is still owed. For regular clients, make the invoice recurring: their first payment saves their card, and every future invoice is then charged automatically when it is issued.

Yes, on the Growth and Complete plans. You can invite an accountant by email; they get read/write access to your bookkeeping, invoices, and reports, scoped to your business, while sensitive actions like payments and plan upgrades stay owner-only.

You can cancel a paid plan at any time — it stays active until the end of the current billing period. Upgrading is self-serve from your dashboard; downgrading is handled by contacting us, to help avoid accidentally losing access to your own records.

Yes. Every business can export its contacts, invoices, invoice line items, ledger entries, and chart of accounts as CSV files from Settings, at any time, on any plan.

We keep standard daily backups of the database, retained for 7 days, but we do not currently offer extended point-in-time recovery — so in a worst-case technical failure, up to roughly a day of recent entries could be lost. Because of this, you are responsible for keeping your own independent backup: use the free data export in Settings to download your contacts, invoices, transactions, and chart of accounts as CSV files at any time, on any plan. We recommend doing this regularly — for example, monthly. See our Terms & Conditions for details.

Yes — MTD for VAT is included on every plan, including Starter. AxiomaBooks calculates your 9 VAT return boxes and exports them as a CSV file. You import that CSV into any MTD bridging software like My Tax Digital — an HMRC-recognised bridge — and submit directly to HMRC. The CSV import satisfies HMRC's digital-link requirement under VAT Notice 700/22.

MTD bridging software is HMRC-recognised software that submits your VAT figures to HMRC for you. Providers are private companies, not part of HMRC, and pricing varies — but some, like My Tax Digital, work in any browser. You sign in with your own Government Gateway credentials, import your VAT figures from AxiomaBooks, and submit directly to HMRC. The choice of provider is yours.

No. Your Government Gateway credentials are yours alone. When submitting via any MTD bridging software like My Tax Digital, you sign in to that software with your own Gov Gateway login — AxiomaBooks never sees or stores your HMRC credentials. AxiomaBooks only handles your bookkeeping data, not your HMRC account.

MTD for Income Tax Self-Assessment (ITSA) requires self-employed individuals and landlords to file quarterly income and expense updates to HMRC digitally, instead of a single annual Self-Assessment return. It applies from April 2026 for those earning over £50,000/year (£30k from April 2027, £20k from April 2028). AxiomaBooks tracks your income and expenses throughout the year, giving you the figures you need. Some MTD bridging software, like My Tax Digital, also covers ITSA — the same tool handles both VAT MTD and Income Tax MTD.

MTD VAT export is included on all plans — Starter (£9.95/mo), Growth (£19.95/mo), and Complete (£24.95/mo). Starter and Growth users submit via any MTD bridging software like My Tax Digital, an HMRC-recognised bridge. Complete-tier users will also get native one-click submission directly from within AxiomaBooks (coming soon), with no third-party tool required.

Yes, completely. HMRC's digital-links requirement (VAT Notice 700/22) allows a structured CSV export from accounting software imported into an HMRC-recognised bridging tool as a valid digital link — provided figures are transferred electronically, not manually retyped. AxiomaBooks' CSV export satisfies this requirement. HMRC-recognised bridging software like My Tax Digital handles the actual API submission. This is the same route used by thousands of small businesses across the UK.