Platform Update: Identifying the Quarterly Submission Archive Gap

Version: 1.0.272 · Date: 2025

As part of our ongoing commitment to transparency about platform capabilities, we are publishing details of a mission gap identified in this release cycle: the absence of a quarterly submission archive and soft-delete feature.

The Problem

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax Self Assessment (MTD ITSA) requires landlords and self-employed taxpayers to submit quarterly updates to HMRC across multiple tax years. Over time, this generates a significant volume of submission records — including drafts that were started but not completed, or records created in error.

Currently, our platform has no way to archive, hide, or soft-delete these records. The quarterly submissions page shows every record regardless of its relevance, which becomes a real usability problem for anyone who has been using the platform across more than one tax year.

What We Found

Our audit identified three specific gaps:

1. Limited submission status model The quarterly_summaries status model supports six states (draft, pending, submitting, submitted, failed, rejected) but does not include an archived state. There is no way to mark a submission as inactive without deleting it entirely — and deletion is not appropriate where audit trails must be preserved.

2. No archive API There is no tRPC mutation to transition a submission to an archived state. This means the gap cannot be worked around at the API level either.

3. No UI controls The quarterly submissions page provides no interface for archiving, filtering, or restoring submissions.

Why We're Sharing This

We track planned features against actual implementation as part of our release process. When a feature that is essential to long-term usability is confirmed as absent, we document it openly so that:

Users understand the current limitations of the platform
Support teams can set accurate expectations
The engineering backlog reflects real user impact

This feature has been elevated to high severity given that its absence compounds with platform usage over time — the longer a user has been on the platform, the more acute the problem becomes.

What Comes Next

The archive/soft-delete feature is now a prioritised backlog item. The implementation will be non-destructive — archived submissions will be retained in full for audit and compliance purposes, but removed from the default view. Users will be able to view and restore archived submissions at any time.

We will update the Quarterly Submission Archive Gap documentation page and the Changelog when this ships.

For questions about this gap or its impact on your account, please contact support.