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FeaturesMaking Tax DigitalUpdated March 4, 2026

Fix: Multi-Business Dashboard — All HMRC Businesses Now Visible

Fix: Multi-Business Dashboard — All HMRC Businesses Now Visible

Version: 1.0.278
Severity: High — Core Functionality

Overview

If you are a landlord who also works as a self-employed contractor or sole trader, you likely have two separate businesses registered with HMRC under MTD ITSA: one for your property income and one for your self-employment income. Until this release, the quarterly summary dashboard only ever showed and allowed submissions for the first of those businesses. The second was invisible.

This post explains what was happening, who was affected, and what has changed.

The Problem

The quarterly summary dashboard contained a line of code that selected the active business like this:

const business = businesses[0] ?? null;

This meant that no matter how many HMRC business entities were associated with your account, only the first one in the list was ever used. There was no dropdown, no switcher, and no indication that other businesses existed in the UI at all.

This was a significant gap because:

  • The backend database (hmrcBusinesses table) correctly stores one row per business per organisation — so the data was always there
  • The quarterly_summaries schema already has a business selector field, designed to associate each summary with a specific business entity
  • But the dashboard never exposed this, making multi-business accounts functionally broken for quarterly submissions

Who Was Affected

This affected any user whose HMRC MTD ITSA enrolment covers more than one business. The most common scenario is the landlord-who-freelances: someone who earns property income from rental properties and self-employment income from freelance or contract work. Under MTD ITSA, each income stream is treated as a distinct business, each requiring its own quarterly submissions and annual summary.

The Fix

The dashboard now:

  1. Loads all hmrcBusinesses rows associated with your organisation, not just the first
  2. Renders a business selector on the quarterly summary dashboard, letting you switch between your registered HMRC business entities
  3. Scopes all quarterly summary data and submission actions to the currently selected business

No changes to your data or HMRC connection are required. The fix works with your existing linked businesses — if you have already connected your HMRC account and both businesses were enrolled, they will now both appear automatically.

Using the Business Selector

After updating to v1.0.278:

  1. Navigate to the Quarterly Summary dashboard
  2. You will see a business selector near the top of the page listing all HMRC businesses linked to your account (e.g. "Property Business" and "Self-Employment")
  3. Select the business you want to view or submit for
  4. All income, expenses, and submission status shown on the page will reflect the selected business
  5. To manage a different business, simply switch the selector — your data for each business is kept separate

Background: MTD ITSA and Multiple Businesses

Under Making Tax Digital for Income Tax Self Assessment (MTD ITSA), HMRC requires separate quarterly updates for each source of income above the threshold. A landlord who also freelances must therefore submit:

  • Quarterly updates for their UK Property income (rental income and allowable expenses)
  • Quarterly updates for their Self-Employment income (trading income and expenses)
  • Separate annual summaries and a final declaration that consolidates both

This platform is built specifically to support this multi-income-stream model. This release closes a critical gap that prevented the UI from reflecting what the backend and HMRC's APIs already supported.

No Action Required

This fix is applied automatically. If you have multiple businesses registered, they will appear in the selector the next time you load the quarterly summary dashboard. If you only have one business, nothing changes — the experience is identical to before.

If you believe you should have multiple businesses listed but only see one, check that both businesses are enrolled in MTD ITSA with HMRC and that you have authorised this platform to act on behalf of both via the HMRC OAuth connection.