August wins HMRC recognition for Making Tax Digital

The self-managing landlord has never been well served by software. Most UK landlords own between one and five homes, run them without an agent, and administer the lot from a spreadsheet, a folder of scanned PDFs and a bank statement scrolled through in January. August, the rental platform operated by Augur Technologies Limited, was built for exactly that person, and in June 2026 it secured a place on HMRC's published list of software recognised for Making Tax Digital for Income Tax.

Richard Samuel, the company's chief executive, spoke to Disrupts about what recognition took, what landlords entering digital tax reporting are finding hardest, and how the market changes as the regime widens.

The gap August set out to close, Samuel argues, is where most of the rental sector actually lives. “At one end sat free spreadsheets. At the other sat agency systems priced and designed for firms managing hundreds of units, with onboarding to match. The self-managing landlord fell into the gap between the two, and the gap is where most of the sector actually lives,” he said. The platform puts rent tracking, expenses, compliance deadlines, documents, tenancy records and tax reporting in one place across web, iOS and Android, and the company, a team of seven, says it now supports more than 3,000 landlords and tenants across the UK.

HMRC recognition means a landlord can keep digital records in August and file quarterly updates to HMRC without leaving the platform or exporting anything into a second system. Earning it, Samuel says, was a matter of proof rather than engineering. “Getting there was less about writing code and more about proving the code behaved. We built against HMRC's APIs and tested the full journey end to end. HMRC does not hand recognition out on request. You demonstrate that the submission path works correctly before you are listed.”

The wider significance, he adds, is credibility. “A small, but fast growing company, now sits on the same government list as accounting platforms many times our size. For a landlord choosing software, that is a meaningful leveller.”

With Making Tax Digital drawing millions of landlords into digital tax reporting for the first time, Samuel says the hardest adjustment is not the technology but the rhythm. “Landlords have spent decades treating tax as an annual event, something you assemble in the weeks before 31 January. Making Tax Digital converts it into a continuous obligation with four checkpoints a year, and the record keeping has to be done as you go rather than reconstructed afterwards.”

The second difficulty is scope. Qualifying income is gross, before expenses, and it combines rental and sole trade income, so plenty of landlords who assume they are outside the regime are not. Joint ownership adds another layer, because only the landlord's share counts. August's answer is to remove the reconstruction altogether: income arrives through a bank feed, expenses are logged and categorised against HMRC-aligned labels as they happen, receipts are photographed at the point of spend, and the quarterly summary is already assembled when the deadline arrives. The company also maintains a plain English explanation of the rules and timelines in its Making Tax Digital overview.

The platform is built on open banking, a choice Samuel traces back to a simple fact. “Rent either arrived or it did not, and the bank knows before anyone else does. Everything else in a landlord's admin is downstream of that fact.” A spreadsheet depends entirely on the landlord remembering, he says, and is accurate only for as long as discipline holds, while a bolt-on tax tool arrives at the end of the process when the year is already over. “Open banking makes the record a by-product of the money moving.” August is an agent of Plaid Financial Ltd, which is regulated by the FCA, and the connection is read-only. Payments are matched to tenancies and properties automatically, tenants can pay through the platform with no fees, and no money is held by August.

The company's AI layer, August Intelligence, is grounded in the landlord's own portfolio rather than in general knowledge, a distinction Samuel considers decisive. “There is no shortage of chatbots that will explain a Section 21 notice in the abstract. Far fewer can tell you what is true of your property, your tenancy and your dates.” Today it reads documents and extracts their structure, so a tenancy agreement dropped into the platform populates the rent and the parties rather than being typed in twice, and it answers questions about the portfolio directly. “A landlord who has connected their bank and uploaded their documents has effectively built a structured dataset without meaning to. The AI layer is what makes that dataset answer back.”

As the qualifying thresholds fall to 30,000 pounds in 2027 and 20,000 pounds in 2028, Samuel expects the population entering the regime to change character completely, from established landlords with accountants to the single-property landlord, the accidental landlord who moved in with a partner and kept the flat, and the person letting one former family home. Price sensitivity becomes acute, simplicity beats feature depth, and accountancy capacity gets stretched as hundreds of thousands of small clients move from one annual return to five filings. “I expect software to become the default rather than a considered purchase, and I expect a shakeout among tools that treat MTD as a bolt-on rather than the spine of the product.”

Beyond tax, much of August's work now goes into the Renters' Rights Act 2025, which commenced on 1 May this year and changed possession grounds, notice periods, rent in advance and the penalty regime all at once. The company is deepening its financial capabilities and building for landlords with larger portfolios, and expects continued interest from property managers, small estate agencies and landlord accountants. The ambition, Samuel says, has not changed: “A landlord should be able to run a compliant rental business from their phone and desktop.”