Bug Fix: Finalising Your Tax Year No Longer Fails When HMRC Has Accepted Your Submissions

Release: v1.0.422
Type: Bug fix
Severity: High — blocked the final declaration step for affected users

What happened

A subset of users encountered a frustrating blocker at the very last step of the Making Tax Digital ITSA process: clicking Finalise Tax Year produced an error, even after all four quarterly submissions had been successfully sent to and confirmed by HMRC.

The error message looked like this:

Cannot finalise: the following quarters are not yet submitted:
Q1 (accepted), Q2 (accepted), Q3 (accepted), Q4 (accepted)

At first glance this is confusing — HMRC had accepted every quarter, so why was the platform saying they weren't submitted?

The root cause

HMRC uses two separate status values in its submission lifecycle:

submitted — your data has been sent to HMRC and is pending review.
accepted — HMRC has reviewed and confirmed receipt of your submission. This is the better of the two states.

The validation logic inside the finaliseTaxYear mutation was written to only recognise 'submitted' as a valid ready-state. It treated 'accepted' — a confirmation of success — as if the quarter hadn't been submitted at all, causing the error above.

For users whose submissions moved quickly through HMRC's pipeline (or who returned to finalise their tax year some time after submitting), all four quarters would already be in 'accepted' state, making finalisation impossible.

What's fixed

The validation check now correctly recognises both 'submitted' and 'accepted' as valid states for proceeding to finalisation. If all four quarters are in either of these states, the Finalise Tax Year flow will proceed as expected.

No action is required on your part — the fix is live. If you previously encountered this error, simply return to /dashboard/quarterly and click Finalise Tax Year again.

Who was affected

Any user who:

Successfully submitted all four quarterly periods, and
Had HMRC confirm receipt (status moved to 'accepted') before they clicked Finalise Tax Year.

Users who attempted to finalise while submissions were still in 'submitted' state were not affected.

Next steps

If you are mid-way through the finalisation process and were previously blocked, you can now complete your final declaration. Navigate to Dashboard → Quarterly and select Finalise Tax Year to continue.

If you have any questions, please contact support.

Fixed in src/lib/routers/submission.ts · Released in v1.0.422