Complete your Self Assessment with Tide Accounting

If you're self-employed, you may have to complete your Self Assessment.

This annual process involves calculating your income and expenses, filing your tax return to HMRC, and paying your resulting tax bill.

There are a number of steps you'll need to take, but with Tide Accounting you can complete them with confidence.

Self Assessment made easy

To complete your Self Assessment, you need to:

Understand your business transactions By using Tide Accounting to organise them in one place and categorise them correctly

File your tax return By using Tide Accounting to calculate your overall income and expenses

Pay your resulting tax bill Having used your Tide Accounting Tax Account to put money aside throughout the year

Key dates for completing your Self Assessment

Register for Self Assessment

5 October

File your online tax return

31 January

Pay the tax you owe

31 January

How to complete your Self Assessment

Step 1: Register with HMRC

If you’re filing for the first time, head to gov.uk to register for Self Assessment.

Watch the video provided by HMRC for in-depth information on how to complete this step and step 2.

Step 2: Set up a Government Gateway account

If you haven't already, you'll also need to set up a Government Gateway account by heading to gov.uk.

This allows you to securely log in to your tax account and file your Self Assessment online.

Step 3: Understand your income and expenses

Income is the money you've made through your business.

Expenses are money you've spent on the costs of running your business, such as work equipment, office rent or salaries.

By categorising your business transactions using the steps below, you can identify which transactions are income and which are expenses. We've created a guide to help you categorise your transactions here.

You can then provide this information to HMRC when you file your tax return, so that they can use it to calculate your allowable expenses and your overall tax bill.

Step 4: Sync your transactions to Tide Accounting

Any transactions you make through your Tide account will sync with Tide Accounting.

If you have any additional business bank accounts, you'll need to connect these to Tide Accounting. This way, all of your business transactions will be in one place, allowing you to calculate your overall income and expenses.

The easiest way to connect your other business bank accounts is to log in to your Tide app, and then tap 'Admin' > 'Bookkeeping Score' > 'Settings' > 'Synced Bank Accounts'. Your transaction information from those accounts will be imported to Tide Accounting, and continue to flow through as long as the account is connected.

If you don't have our Accounting Extra or Admin Extra plans, you can do this manually for each transaction you're adding by following Step 5 below.

Step 5: Add any other business transactions

If you made any other business transactions outside of your Tide account, such as cash payments, you'll need to add these to Tide Accounting.

To do this, tap 'Bookkeeping tasks' > 'Add transaction', enter its details, select its category, and confirm.

This way, all of your business transactions will be captured by Tide Accounting, which is essential for filing an accurate report.

Step 6: Complete your bookkeeping

Now all of your business transactions are added to Tide Accounting, you can categorise them using our guide to categories.

Tide automatically categorises up to 70% of transactions made through your account to help you get started.

Tide Accounting will then let you know which transactions you need to categorise yourself. To see this, tap 'Bookkeeping Score' > 'View all transaction tasks'.

It's vital you double check that your categories are correct for all transactions before continuing. Once you've done this, you'll have completed your bookkeeping.

Step 7: View your Self Assessment estimates

Tide Accounting lets you view a live estimate of your tax bill throughout the year, so you can plan ahead and avoid last minute surprises.

It also provides you with calculations of your income and expenses, broken down by categories so you can input the data directly into the HMRC form when filing your return.

These estimates are based on how your transactions have been categorised in Tide Accounting, so make sure you've added and categorised all of your transactions.

View your Self Assessment estimates by tapping 'Tide Accounting' > 'Self Assessment'.

Step 8: Put money aside in a Tax Account

You must pay your tax bill by 31 January. Setting aside money throughout the year builds cash reserves and reduces stress at payment time.

With our dedicated Tax Account, you can regularly put money aside to protect your cash flow and meet your tax goal target.

The Tax Account is exclusive to members who have our Accounting Extra and Admin Extra products, and can be set up by tapping 'Accounting' > 'Open a Tax Account'. Set a tax goal, add when you want to hit the goal and add funds throughout the year.

Step 9: File your Self Assessment

You'll be able to file your Self Assessment anytime between April 6 and January 31 in the following year.

To successfully complete your return, you'll need to provide HMRC with details of your income and expenses, so they can calculate your tax bill. You can find this information in the Tide Accounting 'Self Assessment' tab.

Our Self Assessment calculations correspond directly to the fields in the HMRC form, so you can easily copy and paste them across. Log in to your Government Gateway account and add these calculations into the return form to file your Self Assessment.

Step 10: Pay your tax bill

You'll need to pay your tax bill by 31 January. You can do this online by visiting gov.uk and following the instructions.

Once this is done, you'll have completed your Self Assessment!

Find more information

Your guide to transaction categories

Find in-depth information on what each Tide transaction category means.

Learn more

Frequently asked questions

If you've got a specific query, our FAQs are the quickest way to find the answer.

Find your answer