On 18 December 2017 HMRC published draft legislation explaining in more detail what will be required when Making Tax Digital becomes compulsory for VAT in April 2019. There is a consultation period, the deadline for which is 9 February 2018 and we will advise you further once the outcome from this is known.
HMRC have indicated they are proposing a twelve months soft landing period, with no record keeping penalties for businesses during that time During that period it will be acceptable for data to be transferred between software and spreadsheets manually, although the final submission will have to be made to HMRC using Application Programming Interference (API) enabled software.