Can Claude or Claude Cowork do Making Tax Digital?

Short answer

Claude can do most of the work, through a connector to your accounting ledger: record income and expenses, sort them into HMRC's categories and prepare each quarterly update. Claude itself is not software on HMRC's list, so the update and the tax return are sent from a compatible product.

How Claude reaches your books

Claude works with outside tools through connectors that speak the Model Context Protocol, an open standard (modelcontextprotocol.io). Anthropic's small business plugin connects Claude to several ledgers (GitHub). In Claude Cowork you can give it a task such as "get my Q2 MTD figures ready" and it works through the steps.

What Claude can do for MTD

Read receipts and bills from your email or uploads and record them.
Explain each bank line and pick the category.
Split shared costs, such as a phone used for work and home, the way you tell it.
Check the quarter: missing receipts, double entries, rent not received.
Remind you of 7 August, 7 November, 7 February and 7 May.

What it cannot do on its own

It cannot sign you up, authorise software in your HMRC account, or send figures to HMRC without compatible software in between (GOV.UK). You remain responsible for the return.

Octobooks with Claude

Octobooks is a ledger built for your own AI: you add its connector to Claude and Claude keeps the books in it, under switches you set. Octobooks keeps the books of UK sole traders and landlords and sorts every entry into the categories of the self-employment pages (SA103F) and the UK property pages (SA105). Its Making Tax Digital for Income Tax connection is built and runs end to end against HMRC's test service (the sandbox). Octobooks is not on HMRC's list of compatible software yet; we are working towards recognition. Until it is listed, send your updates and your return through a product that is on the list.

Sources

Updated 2026-10-29. General information, not tax advice for your own case.