Sage says its AI saves people over five hours a week. The people who said so are not named, and we cannot find anyone outside the company who has checked

Since 6 April 2026, sole traders and landlords with qualifying income over 50,000 pounds have been required by law to keep digital records and send quarterly updates to HMRC. They cannot do it on paper and they cannot do it through their HMRC online account. They must use a commercial product from HMRC's recognised list, because HMRC does not make one. Its own campaign site says so plainly, in answer to a question it evidently expects people to ask: does HMRC have its own Making Tax Digital software. No.

So the state has made buying into a software market a condition of paying income tax, for a population it puts at more than 864,000 people. What are those products telling that population they will get?

On 25 February 2026, Sage Group plc, a FTSE 100 company, announced it was putting an agentic AI assistant into Sage Sole Trader, its accounting app for non-VAT-registered sole traders. The app costs nothing to use. In the notes to editors of that announcement, Sage says of the assistant: early adopters say it is like having an extra pair of hands in the office, saving them over five hours each week on manual tasks.

Early adopters. No number of them, no sample, no method, no study, and nothing published that anyone outside Sage could examine. We have put that to Sage and we will print the answer in full whenever it arrives.

Readers of this paper on Tuesday will recognise the shape. Two days ago we reported that the figure of five or more hours saved per lawyer per week, which has circulated through British legal technology coverage for two years, originates in a case study published by the supplier of the software. A second figure, that 84 per cent of solicitors save up to six hours a week on drafting, is published by another supplier.

We are not suggesting these are connected. We have no evidence of that and we are not going to imply it. What we can say is narrower and, to us, more interesting: the same unverified figure, at the same magnitude, sourced in the same way to unnamed satisfied users, now sits in two professional software markets that have nothing to do with each other. In neither case can we find anyone outside the industry who has measured it.

The word free is doing work here too. More than twenty recognised products have a genuine no-cost tier. But QuickFile's excludes Making Tax Digital for income tax, which is a paid extra. FreeAgent's route is open to you if you bank with NatWest, RBS, Ulster or Mettle. This is not new. In written evidence to the Public Accounts Committee in 2023, Coachbuilt Cars Ltd told MPs that HMRC's own list contained many products listed as free that were in fact not.

Now the other side of it, at full strength, because it is real. HMRC surveyed VAT businesses in 2021 and found 80 per cent thought the software easy to use and 30 per cent believed they were financially better off. Fourteen per cent thought the costs had beaten the benefits. And at the first quarterly deadline on 7 August, more than 436,000 of the 570,000 people who had signed up filed on time. Three quarters, at a first deadline, in a system four months old. That is not a shambles.

What we cannot tell you is how many of the 864,000 are paying for the software they are now required to own. HMRC may not hold it. We have asked.