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The FreeAgent features freelancers actually use — and quietly love

By Buzz Accounting · 2026-07-13

FreeAgent has a long feature list. Freelancers use about five of those features constantly, ignore most of the rest, and those five are the difference between accounting being a low-grade dread and a non-event. Since April 2026 there is a sixth reason to care, because Making Tax Digital has turned bookkeeping from an annual chore into a quarterly deadline. Here is what actually earns its keep, what it costs, and how to get it for nothing.

What it costs — and when it costs nothing

FreeAgent's list prices are £19 a month for sole traders, £27 for partnerships and LLPs and £33 for limited companies, all excluding 20% VAT. Over three years that is £684, £972 or £1,188 before VAT.

Two routes get you the same software free:

A NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland or Ulster Bank business account — free for as long as you hold the account, with no usage condition attached.
A Mettle account — free provided you make at least one transaction a month. Miss that and the entitlement lapses, which is a genuinely easy trap in a quiet month.

So a sole trader paying full price for FreeAgent while holding an eligible bank account is spending £228 a year plus VAT on something they already qualify for. That is worth ten minutes of checking. Our business banking page compares the accounts themselves, and our Mettle review covers the FSCS point that catches sole traders out.

1. Invoicing that chases for you

Create an invoice in about a minute, attach a pay link, and set automatic reminders that go out before and after the due date. The reminders are the feature, not the invoice template. Chasing late payment is the job every freelancer postpones because it feels rude, and software doing it on a schedule removes both the awkwardness and the delay — our post on invoices that do not get ignored sets out the wider escalation ladder.

2. Bank feeds that learn your categories

Connect the account and transactions arrive pre-sorted, with the categorisation improving as you correct it. What used to be an evening of typing becomes a few minutes of approving. The compounding benefit is accuracy rather than speed: expenses categorised weekly, while you still remember what the payment was for, are far more complete than expenses reconstructed in January from a bank statement.

3. The tax timeline

This is the single most useful feature for a self-employed person. FreeAgent maintains a running estimate of what you will owe and when — Self Assessment, payments on account, VAT if you are registered — laid out on a timeline rather than delivered as a shock. You watch the number build through the year and set money aside against it, which is the entire mechanism by which people stop dreading January. Payments on account are the classic ambush; our first Self Assessment guide explains why the first bill is so much larger than expected.

4. Receipt capture from your pocket

Photograph a receipt on your phone and it is filed against an expense — mileage, use of home, subscriptions, equipment. This is where freelancers stop quietly leaking legitimate claims. Capture at the point of spending beats memory every time, and as our expenses guide shows, the amounts add up to real tax rather than rounding errors.

5. Making Tax Digital, which is now the point

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax started on 6 April 2026, and this is the feature that moved from nice-to-have to unavoidable. FreeAgent keeps the digital records MTD requires as a by-product of normal use and files the quarterly updates directly.

Whether you are in it yet depends on your qualifying income, and the definition trips people up: it is your gross self-employment and property income added together, before expenses. Not profit. Employment income, dividends, pensions and partnership profit shares do not count towards it.

From 6 April 2026 — qualifying income over £50,000 on your 2024/25 return.
From April 2027 — over £30,000 on your 2025/26 return.
From April 2028 — over £20,000 on your 2026/27 return.

Worked example — illustrative figures. Dan is a freelance copywriter. His 2024/25 return showed £38,000 of self-employment turnover and £14,000 of rental income from a flat, with £11,000 of combined expenses.
His profit was £41,000. His qualifying income is the gross figure: £38,000 + £14,000 = £52,000.
That is over £50,000, so Dan has been inside MTD since 6 April 2026 — despite never having thought of himself as a £50,000 earner. A friend with £48,000 of turnover and no rental income is not in until April 2027 at the earliest, on the £30,000 threshold.

The four dates you are now working to

If you are in MTD, the annual return is replaced by four quarterly updates plus a year-end declaration. The standard periods and deadlines are fixed:

6 April to 5 July — due 7 August
6 April to 5 October — due 7 November
6 April to 5 January — due 7 February
6 April to 5 April — due 7 May in the following tax year

Note that the periods are cumulative from 6 April rather than discrete three-month blocks, so each update restates the year to date. The practical effect is that an error in quarter one is corrected in quarter two rather than needing an amendment — genuinely forgiving, provided the records exist to correct it from. The first deadline under the new regime fell on 7 August 2026. Our MTD guide for the self-employed covers the year-end declaration and the exemptions.

What the software cannot do

It is worth being straight about this. FreeAgent records what you tell it and calculates from that. It does not know that the laptop was 70% business use, that a payment from a client was actually a refunded expense, or that you should have registered for VAT two months ago. It will not tell you that your day rate has been static for three years while your costs have not — a judgement we cover in our post on pricing your work. And it cannot decide whether the trading allowance or actual expenses leaves you better off.

The tax timeline is an estimate built from the categorisations you approved. If those are wrong, it is confidently wrong, which is worse than obviously wrong. Software plus nobody checking is how people end up with tidy books and an incorrect return.

Why it is included in our packages

FreeAgent was built for freelancers before it was built for anyone else, which is why it fits the self-employed better than tools designed for companies and then scaled down. It is included free in every one of our packages, set up for you, with a named accountant checking the numbers, handling the quarterly updates, and answering the quick questions that would otherwise sit in your head for a fortnight. The software does the admin; we catch what it cannot see. Get started from £19 + VAT a month.

Quick answers

About this post

How much does FreeAgent cost, and can I get it free?

List prices are £19 a month for sole traders, £27 for partnerships and LLPs and £33 for limited companies, all excluding 20% VAT. Two routes make it free. Holding a NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland or Ulster Bank business account gives you FreeAgent for as long as you keep the account, with no conditions. A Mettle account also includes it, but with one requirement: you must make at least one transaction a month, or the free entitlement lapses. It is also included in all of our packages, set up and reviewed by an accountant rather than left for you to configure.

Does FreeAgent handle Making Tax Digital for Income Tax?

Yes. It keeps records in the digital form MTD requires and submits the quarterly updates to HMRC directly, so the compliance happens as a by-product of normal bookkeeping rather than as a separate exercise. The four standard update periods run from 6 April and are due on 7 August, 7 November, 7 February and 7 May, followed by a year-end declaration that replaces the old annual return. What software cannot do is decide what belongs in which category, so the quality of the submission still depends on the underlying records being right.

Am I actually inside MTD for Income Tax yet?

It depends on your qualifying income, which is gross self-employment and property income added together before expenses — not your profit. Employment income, dividends and pensions do not count. If that figure was over £50,000 on your 2024/25 return, you have been in MTD since 6 April 2026. Over £30,000 on your 2025/26 return brings you in from April 2027, and over £20,000 on your 2026/27 return from April 2028. Because it is measured gross, plenty of people with modest profits are caught earlier than they expect, particularly anyone combining freelance work with rental income.

Is FreeAgent better than a spreadsheet for a freelancer?

For anyone inside Making Tax Digital the comparison has largely ended, because MTD requires digital records and quarterly submissions through compatible software, and a plain spreadsheet does not file to HMRC on its own. Below the threshold a spreadsheet can still work if you are disciplined about it. The practical difference is not the arithmetic but the capture: bank feeds and phone receipt capture record costs at the moment they happen, whereas a spreadsheet is usually filled in from memory months later, which is where legitimate claims quietly disappear.

Do I still need an accountant if I use FreeAgent?

The software and the accountant do different jobs, so this is less either-or than it looks. FreeAgent records and calculates from what you tell it. It cannot judge that a laptop was 70% business use, that you should have registered for VAT, that a payment was a refunded expense rather than income, or whether the trading allowance beats claiming actual costs. Its tax timeline is only as accurate as the categorisations behind it, so a wrong entry produces a confident wrong estimate. Most freelancers use both: software for the admin, a person for the judgement calls and the final return.

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