Clear Books – What You Need to Know

How Clear Books Handles MTD Compliance

Clear Books is fully HMRC-recognised for Making Tax Digital for Income Tax and has been building with digital links since before MTD for VAT was rolled out. The free plan includes MTD quarterly updates and year-end tax return filing for sole traders and landlords with basic needs — with no transaction limits and no time restrictions. Paid plans add bank feeds, receipt scanning, multiple property tracking, and full reporting. Clear Books supports sole trader income and UK property income for MTD ITSA purposes. Foreign property income support is not clearly confirmed in Clear Books' official documentation — landlords with overseas rental income should verify this directly before committing.

For joint ownership, Clear Books has confirmed through its community forum that each co-owner must maintain a separate Clear Books account and record their own share of income and expenses manually. This is compliant with HMRC's requirements (which require each individual to submit their own share), but it does not provide automatic profit-splitting — landords must calculate and enter their share themselves. Clear Books also supports agent filing via its free accountant portal.

Clear Books: Landlord Accounting Without Full Property Management

Clear Books' Property plan (£5/month + VAT) is specifically designed for landlords and provides recurring rent invoice setup per property or tenancy, overdue rent monitoring, per-property profitability tracking, bank feeds with automated matching, receipt capture, balance sheet reporting, and a rent due vs received report. These are practical and well-designed landlord accounting features. However, Clear Books does not include property portfolio management, tenant management, HMO unit-level tracking, or automatic joint ownership profit-splitting. It is an accounting tool for landlords rather than a combined property management and accounting platform.

Clear Books: Full-Featured Double-Entry Accounting

Clear Books provides a full accounting toolkit including double-entry bookkeeping, bank reconciliation via automated feeds from 70+ UK banks, a customisable general chart of accounts, journals, lock date ranges, audit log, cash and accruals basis accounting, and a full suite of financial reports. Its standout feature is Auto Explain — an AI-powered bank reconciliation tool that learns transaction patterns over time, pre-filling the VAT rate, account code, and customer or supplier for recurring transactions. This significantly reduces manual reconciliation effort. Clear Books also supports spreadsheet import and export across all plans, offering flexibility for landlords transitioning from spreadsheet-based records. VAT returns (on paid plans), CIS submissions, and optional payroll are also available, making it a broader accounting solution than RentalBux for landlords with wider business needs.

Clear Books: A Full Invoicing and Automation Toolkit for Businesses and Landlords

Clear Books includes bill and receipt scanning from photos and PDFs on its paid plans (including the £5/month + VAT Property plan), with auto-extraction of amounts and dates. Auto Explain provides AI-powered bank feed matching that learns transaction patterns and pre-fills account codes and supplier details for recurring items. Invoice creation with customisable templates and automatic payment reminder emails are included on paid plans. Clear Books does not offer AI-powered OCR that reads and categorises receipts in the same way as RentalBux — it extracts amounts and dates from receipts but relies on Auto Explain for categorisation from bank feeds rather than from receipt content.

Clear Books: Broad Reporting Across All Business Types

Clear Books provides a comprehensive reporting suite including profit & loss, balance sheet, trial balance, cashflow, rent due vs received, and tax estimate reports on paid plans. The tax estimate is updated based on recorded income and expenses, helping landlords plan for their tax liability throughout the year. The free plan provides basic reports only. Advanced project accounting and budget comparison reports are available on the Large plan. Reports can be downloaded as PDFs or exported.

Clear Books: Free Accountant Portal, Unlimited Users, and Proven Mobile Access

Clear Books offers a dedicated, fully free accountant and bookkeeper portal — accountants can register at no cost and manage multiple client accounts from a single dashboard, with no per-client charge. This makes it commercially attractive for accountancy practices looking to standardise their client base on one platform. Within each client account, accountants have access to journals, audit log, lock date ranges, and all financial reports — the same tools available to the client themselves. All paid Clear Books plans include unlimited users at no extra cost, meaning a landlord can give their accountant, bookkeeper, co-owner, and property manager simultaneous access without paying additional per-seat fees.

Clear Books: Ease of Use

Clear Books is consistently praised for its ease of use, clean dashboard interface, and responsive UK-based support team. It is rated "Excellent" on Trustpilot with 326+ reviews. Users consistently highlight the knowledge and responsiveness of the UK-based phone and email support team, and the intuitive dashboard that makes core financial data easy to access. One Trustpilot reviewer specifically noted using both Clear Books' Ltd company package and its landlord package simultaneously, praising the ease of use and responsive support. Some reviews note occasional interface changes that require users to re-learn navigation, and a small number of users mention VAT adjustment workflows as needing improvement. Clear Books offers a 30-day no-obligation free trial of paid plans.