InvoiceAdept vs FreeAgent: invoicing vs accounting for UK trades (2026)

The short answer

InvoiceAdept is trade invoicing, not accounting: free, Pro £7.99 a month and Pro+ £12.99 a month (excl. VAT), and none of them file to HMRC. FreeAgent is HMRC-recognised accounting that does file: £19 a month for sole traders (£190 a year), or £0 with a qualifying NatWest bank account. Invoice in InvoiceAdept, file from FreeAgent. That is the clean 2026 setup.

What are InvoiceAdept and FreeAgent?

This is not a "which invoicing app is nicer" article. InvoiceAdept and FreeAgent do different jobs.

InvoiceAdept is invoicing software for UK trades. You raise the invoice, send it, and get paid. It keeps a digital record of that income. It does not send Making Tax Digital updates to HMRC and it does not submit your Self Assessment return. The company behind it is Tech Me Today Ltd, Companies House 15917255, ICO registration ZB944663. Plans, checked on the pricing page on 29 August 2026, all exclude VAT:

• Free £0. Up to 5 invoices a month, one user, email, PDF and customer portal.
• Pro £7.99 a month. Unlimited invoices, up to 3 users, Stripe card payments with no extra InvoiceAdept platform fee, automatic reminders, WhatsApp invoice delivery, branding, recurring invoices, quotes and expense tracking.
• Pro+ £12.99 a month. Everything in Pro, plus CIS invoices, bank reconciliation, cashflow forecasting, advanced reports, an audit log and unlimited users.

Annual billing is advertised at 20% off, and paid features have a 14-day trial. What that list does not include: quarterly MTD for Income Tax updates, Self Assessment filing, VAT return filing, or the contractor's monthly CIS300 return. Digital records, yes. Filing, no. There is a longer, dedicated explanation of that split in our MTD invoicing guide.

FreeAgent is UK cloud accounting software, owned by the NatWest Group. It has invoicing, estimates, expenses, bank feeds, payroll, a tax timeline, and the bit InvoiceAdept will not pretend to match: a filing path to HMRC. On FreeAgent's own pages, checked 29 August 2026, it is an HMRC-recognised product for submitting MTD-compatible VAT returns, and it is also on HMRC's list for MTD for Income Tax, so sole traders can send quarterly updates and the final declaration from the account. That is accounting software. The invoice is one screen among many, and you buy it, or claim it free with a qualifying bank account, because you want the books and the HMRC connection in one login.

How much does FreeAgent cost?

Figures below were fetched from freeagent.com/pricing and all exclude 20% VAT. The page is tabbed by business type, so these numbers come from the Sole trader panel, not the limited-company default.

• Sole trader regular monthly: £19 a month.
• Sole trader introductory monthly: £9.50 a month for the first six months (50% off).
• Sole trader regular annual: £190 a year.
• Sole trader introductory annual: £95 a year for the first year (50% off, which FreeAgent equates to £7.92 a month).
• 30-day free trial, cancel at any time.

Free with certain bank accounts, £0.00: if you hold a business current account with NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland or Ulster Bank, for as long as you keep it, or a Mettle account and you make at least one transaction a month. FreeAgent's free-account page says this is the same core product as a paid licence, not a cut-down version. Optional add-ons may still be chargeable.

Optional add-ons, any plan: Smart Capture Unlimited at £5 a month if you need more than the included 10 receipt and bill captures, and the Amazon UK Marketplace connection at £6 a month.

Other business types, for context, from the same live page: limited company £33 a month (£330 a year); partnership or LLP £27 a month (£270 a year); unincorporated landlord £10 a month (£100 a year). Each currently shows the same 50% introductory offer, so a limited-company electrician is not on the £19 sole-trader ticket.

InvoiceAdept vs FreeAgent at a glance

	InvoiceAdept	FreeAgent
What it is	Trade invoicing and digital records	UK accounting and HMRC filing
Price (29 Aug 2026, excl. VAT)	Free / Pro £7.99 / Pro+ £12.99. Annual 20% off advertised	Sole trader £19 a month (£190 a year); intro 50% off first six months (£9.50) or first year (£95). Ltd £33 a month
Free plan	Yes, 5 invoices a month, one user	Yes, full product if you hold a qualifying NatWest, RBS or Ulster Bank business current account, or a Mettle account with at least one transaction a month. Otherwise a 30-day trial, not a permanent free tier
CIS	Deduction on the invoice on Pro+ (£12.99). Labour vs materials split. Does not file CIS300	Contractor CIS bookkeeping: bills, deduction rates, CIS300 preparation, payment and deduction statements. FreeAgent's help centre says it is not currently possible to file CIS300 from FreeAgent. Subcontractor CIS income can be recorded, including from the bank feed
MTD: records	Yes, invoices, payments and expenses on paid plans; export for an accountant	Yes, full digital books, bank feeds, categorisation
MTD: filing to HMRC	No. Does not send quarterly ITSA updates, the Self Assessment return, or the VAT return	Yes, for the regimes it is recognised for. HMRC-recognised for MTD VAT and for sole-trader MTD for Income Tax. Confirm Income Tax is live on the account type you open
WhatsApp send	Native send on Pro and Pro+	Not a headline feature. You can paste a PDF or a payment link yourself
Card / online payment fees	Stripe on Pro+. InvoiceAdept adds no platform fee. Stripe's published UK standard rate is 1.5% + 20p for UK cards (2.5% + 20p international)	Tyl by NatWest, Stripe, GoCardless and PayPal. Those partners charge their own fees; FreeAgent does not publish a single platform percentage on its pricing page
Who it is for	Trades who need to bill from a phone, get paid, and keep a clean income record to export	Sole traders and small companies who want one login for books and HMRC filing, especially if FreeAgent is already free with their bank
Best used as	The front end: send, chase, collect	The back end: bank, tax estimate, quarterly update, return

That table is the heart of the article. The rest of this page explains why those rows look like that.

Can InvoiceAdept file Making Tax Digital updates to HMRC?

Start on GOV.UK's Making Tax Digital for Income Tax guidance, not on a feature grid. Compatible software has to create and store digital records of income and expenses, send quarterly updates to HMRC, and submit the tax return by 31 January the following year. An invoicing app that stores PDFs and exports a spreadsheet has done the first of those. It has not done the second or the third.

GOV.UK's find out if and when you need to use MTD for Income Tax (last updated 26 March 2026) is the live rule. The thresholds and start dates are:

• over £50,000 for the 2024 to 2025 tax year, from 6 April 2026.
• over £30,000 for the 2025 to 2026 tax year, from 6 April 2027.
• over £20,000 for the 2026 to 2027 tax year, from 6 April 2028.

Qualifying income is not profit. It is total income from self-employment and property before expenses. A plumber who invoiced £56,000 and spent £24,000 on fittings is over the 2026 line even if the year felt tight. HMRC reviews your Self Assessment return and writes to people who need to join, but if you did not get a letter it is still your job to check. There is a checker tool on that same page. Use it.

Partnerships come later, and HMRC says it will set out that timeline separately. HMRC also says you can use more than one product, but only one product for each separate submission. That is the legal room for a two-tool setup: InvoiceAdept as the place invoices are born, FreeAgent as the place quarterly updates leave the building.

VAT is a fourth job if you are registered. The VAT registration threshold is £90,000 of taxable turnover on a rolling 12 months, or if you expect to go over it in the next 30 days. MTD for VAT has been live for VAT-registered businesses for years. InvoiceAdept can put 20% on a line. It cannot submit the VAT return. FreeAgent can generate an MTD-compatible VAT return and file it. If you are mandated for Income Tax and you only kept InvoiceAdept PDFs in Downloads, you have records. You do not have a filing product. That is not a small gap, it is the whole of MTD.

Does either product handle CIS?

Under the Construction Industry Scheme, contractors deduct money from a subcontractor's labour and pass it to HMRC. Those deductions are advance payments towards the subcontractor's tax and National Insurance. GOV.UK's what you must do as a CIS subcontractor is the page to read before you trust any software. If you are registered, contractors normally deduct 20%. If you are not registered, they must deduct 30%. Gross payment status means no deduction, if HMRC has granted it. Materials are not in the labour deduction, so an invoice that knocks 20% off a mixed lump of labour-plus-copper is how subcontractors give money away.

InvoiceAdept's job on CIS invoices is the document: gross labour, materials, the rate, the amount withheld, the net payable and UTR on the page. That lives on Pro+ at £12.99 a month excl. VAT. It is not on Free or Pro, and it is not the contractor's monthly CIS return. We do not file CIS300.

FreeAgent's job is the books. If you are a contractor you can set contacts as CIS subcontractors, calculate deductions on bills, prepare the monthly CIS300 figures and produce payment and deduction statements. FreeAgent's help centre is explicit that CIS300 is not filed from FreeAgent today; you take those figures to HMRC's CIS online service, due by the 19th of the month. If you are a subcontractor, FreeAgent can record CIS income and the deduction, including from the bank feed, so the gross (not only the net that landed) sits in the ledger that later feeds MTD. Neither product, as of this check, is one click and HMRC has the CIS300.

How do I get paid with each product?

UK trades already close extras in WhatsApp. The customer who approved the extra socket in a voice note is not waiting in Outlook, so sending the invoice in the same thread matches how the job was sold. InvoiceAdept Pro and Pro+ send the invoice through WhatsApp from the app, payment link attached. You are not photographing a paper pad on the dash.

FreeAgent sends professional invoices, estimates, reminders and online payment links. That is real invoicing, and plenty of sole traders live in it. It is not a WhatsApp-native send. For a main contractor's accounts team, email still wins anyway; they want INV-0142 in the inbox, not a chat bubble on a site manager's personal phone. Use WhatsApp for domestic and small commercial customers who already message you, and email for anyone with a purchase order.

Card collection is the other half of getting paid. On InvoiceAdept Pro the customer can pay by card from the invoice. Stripe processes it and InvoiceAdept does not add a second percentage. Stripe's published UK rate, at stripe.com/gb, is 1.5% + 20p for UK cards and 2.5% + 20p for international cards, and funds land in your Stripe-connected account; we do not hold the money. See the same figure on our pricing page. FreeAgent connects Tyl by NatWest, Stripe, GoCardless and PayPal. Direct Debit via GoCardless is a genuine advantage if you invoice the same landlord every month and you want the collection to pull rather than chase. Read the partner's pricing before you turn the link on.

Bank transfer remains the cheapest way to get paid on both products. Faster Payments into your own account costs you nothing in platform fees. Put the sort code on the invoice and offer the card button for the customer who will not open a banking app.

Is InvoiceAdept cheaper than FreeAgent?

People compare £7.99 with £19 and stop. That only makes sense if both numbers buy the same thing.

£7.99 excl. VAT (InvoiceAdept Pro) buys unlimited invoices, WhatsApp send, Stripe without a platform fee, reminders, quotes, recurring invoices and expenses. It does not buy a bank feed that files VAT, or a quarterly update button.

£12.99 excl. VAT (InvoiceAdept Pro+) adds CIS on the invoice, bank reconciliation, cashflow, reports, an audit log and extra users. Still no HMRC filing and still no CIS300 submission.

£19 excl. VAT (FreeAgent sole trader, after any intro period) buys the accounts suite: bank feeds, categorisation, tax timeline, payroll if you need it, MTD VAT filing and sole-trader MTD for Income Tax filing. It also invoices. It is a different product, so against an accountant's quarterly fee it can be cheap, but against an invoicing subscription it looks expensive because you are no longer comparing invoicing.

£0 (FreeAgent with NatWest, RBS, Ulster or Mettle) is the same accounts suite. If you already hold one of those accounts, the price argument for filing is over. You should still ask whether you will actually raise invoices from FreeAgent on a wet Tuesday, or whether you will keep scribbling totals in Notes and reconstructing them on Sunday. Software you will not open is not free; it is a missed quarterly update.

£0 (InvoiceAdept Free) is five invoices. A kitchen fitter who bills deposit, stage and final on one job can burn the cap on a single contract. Free is a way in, not a working trade's forever plan.

A worked card example, using only InvoiceAdept's published Stripe rate because that is the figure we can stand over. A £1,200 bathroom invoice paid on a standard UK card: 1.5% is £18.00, plus 20p, £18.20. That is Stripe, not us. FreeAgent plus Stripe will be in the same neighbourhood if you use Stripe there too. The 50% FreeAgent introduction of £9.50 a month for six months is real on the live page today, but introductory rates end, so budget the £19.

Can I use InvoiceAdept and FreeAgent together?

Yes, if you are disciplined. HMRC allows more than one product, with a hard rule of one product per submission. The clean version for a mandated sole trader who still wants trade invoicing is:

1. Create and send the invoice in InvoiceAdept, and collect the card or wait for BACS. That is the income record the customer sees.
2. Make sure the same income lands in FreeAgent once, from the bank feed when the money arrives or from a disciplined export, not from raising a second invoice in FreeAgent for the same job.
3. File VAT and quarterly Income Tax updates from FreeAgent, which is the product HMRC can recognise for those submissions.
4. Pick a source of truth. For HMRC, that is FreeAgent. For "has this customer paid?", that is InvoiceAdept.

If you invoice and file inside FreeAgent, you do not need InvoiceAdept. If an accountant already files from their own Xero or QuickBooks file, you do not need FreeAgent either; you need to ask them which export they actually want. Adding a third ledger is how VAT gets declared twice and CIS gets declared never. Learn how the whole flow fits together on our invoicing features page.

Which one should I pick?

Choose InvoiceAdept, and keep filing elsewhere, if: you need to send the invoice from the van, often in WhatsApp; you want card payments without an extra platform percentage on top of Stripe; you need a CIS-shaped invoice on Pro+ and you are not asking the invoicing app to file CIS300; you already have an accountant, or FreeAgent through the bank, and you only needed the front end to get paid; or five invoices a month is enough to try it.

Choose FreeAgent as your main system if: you are a sole trader who has to use MTD for Income Tax and you want to self-file; you are VAT-registered and you want the VAT return to leave the same login as the bank feed; you bank with NatWest, RBS, Ulster Bank or Mettle so the subscription can be £0; you are willing to invoice from an accounts package and WhatsApp-native send is not the reason you opened this tab; or you have staff on payroll and you want PAYE in the same product.

Use both if the first list and the second list are both true. That is a common 2026 setup, not a failure. Choose neither as your only tool if you are a mandated sole trader and you were about to buy invoicing software because a landing page said "MTD-ready". Records are not filing, so read the MTD guide before you pay anyone.

We are careful about what we claim. InvoiceAdept is not HMRC-recognised filing software for MTD VAT or MTD for Income Tax. We do not send quarterly updates, we do not submit the return, and we do not file CIS300. CIS is not on the Free or Pro plan, the free plan is five invoices, and we do not take a platform cut of Stripe payments, but we also do not pretend Stripe is free. FreeAgent is not "the worse invoicing app"; it is a coherent accounts product that happens to invoice, with a genuine HMRC connection and a genuine free path if you hold the right bank account. No star ratings and no "trusted by thousands". Check the live pricing pages again before you pay, because introductory FreeAgent discounts move.

FAQs

Does InvoiceAdept file Making Tax Digital updates to HMRC?

No. We keep digital records of invoices, payments and (on paid plans) expenses, and you can export them. We do not send quarterly Income Tax updates and we do not submit your Self Assessment or VAT return. If you are mandated, use HMRC-recognised software such as FreeAgent, or an accountant who does.

Is FreeAgent HMRC-recognised for MTD?

Yes, for the two regimes it publishes. FreeAgent's pricing FAQ states it is an HMRC-recognised product for MTD-compatible VAT returns, and its free-account pages state it is also on HMRC's list for MTD for Income Tax, so sole traders can send quarterly updates and the final declaration from the account. Confirm the Income Tax piece is live for the account type you open; FreeAgent notes you need a separate account for each MTD income stream.

Can I use InvoiceAdept and FreeAgent together?

Yes, if you are disciplined. Invoice in one place, file in the other, and do not raise the same job twice. HMRC allows more than one product but only one product per submission. Ask your accountant which export they want, whether that is a CSV, a PDF pack, or them ignoring your invoicing app and working from the FreeAgent bank feed.

I bank with NatWest or Mettle. Do I still need InvoiceAdept?

Only if FreeAgent's invoicing is not how you will actually bill. The FreeAgent licence can be free while you keep the account, and Mettle needs at least one transaction a month. Many trades will file in FreeAgent and still want WhatsApp send or a CIS invoice layout from InvoiceAdept. Try FreeAgent's invoice screen on your phone before you add a second subscription.

Which is cheaper?

It depends what you are buying. InvoiceAdept Pro is £7.99 a month excl. VAT, and FreeAgent sole trader is £19 a month excl. VAT after the intro, or £0 with a qualifying bank account. Those numbers are not substitutes. Paying £7.99 for invoicing and nothing for filing, when you are mandated, is not cheaper; it is incomplete. Paying £19 for accounts you will never reconcile, when your accountant already files, is not cheaper either.

Does either product file my CIS300?

InvoiceAdept does not. FreeAgent prepares the monthly CIS300 figures and payment statements, but its help centre says you still file the return outside FreeAgent, for example on HMRC's CIS online service, by the 19th. Contractors remain responsible for verification, deductions and the return.

I earn under £50,000. Can I ignore FreeAgent?

Maybe for this tax year, maybe not. The £50,000 test is qualifying income for 2024 to 2025, before expenses, and it is already in force from 6 April 2026 for people over that line. Later years use £30,000 then £20,000, so use HMRC's checker. Digital invoice records are still useful below the line; filing software becomes mandatory above it.

Are the prices including VAT?

InvoiceAdept states that all prices exclude VAT. FreeAgent states that all prices exclude 20% VAT. Stripe and other payment partners charge separately. Confirm at checkout.

Who operates InvoiceAdept?

Tech Me Today Ltd. Companies House 15917255. ICO registration ZB944663.

The bottom line

If you need to send invoices from the van and be paid without paying a second platform percentage, InvoiceAdept is the stronger invoicing tool, and at £0 to £12.99 a month it keeps more money in your pocket. If you need the books and the HMRC connection in one login, FreeAgent is the stronger accounting tool, especially at £0 with a qualifying bank account. The honest 2026 answer for many mandated sole traders is both: invoice in InvoiceAdept, file from FreeAgent. Start on the free plan, five invoices and no card required, and find your trade on our trade directory. Start free in 30 seconds.