The UK accountancy market has not been short of "client apps" over the last few years. Most of them are document portals with a friendly interface — useful for receiving your accounts as a PDF and signing them digitally, but not much else. When we set out to build the PushDigits — Smart UK Tax Tool on iOS, we deliberately rejected that pattern. Our app was designed to do work, not to display work.
This is a quick tour of the features our clients use most and how each one slots into a real UK tax workflow.
AI Receipt Scanner: Killing the Shoebox
The single most common cause of last-minute year-end stress for sole traders and small company directors is the shoebox of receipts. The PushDigits app uses on-device optical character recognition combined with category classification to capture a receipt in seconds: snap, confirm vendor and category, file. Each scanned item flows into your record set, ready to be cross-referenced with bank transactions.
Because the data lives inside the same ecosystem as your accounting platform, the downstream effects compound — bookkeeping is faster, VAT input recovery is more complete, and the audit trail is intact.
HMRC-Ready Mileage Tracker
Mileage claims are one of the most under-utilised legitimate deductions available to UK directors and sole traders. The reason is friction: nobody wants to record every journey by hand. The app's mileage tracker uses location services to detect trips automatically, classify them as business or personal, and produce an HMRC-format mileage log on demand. The 45p / 25p per mile structure is built in, and the export is ready for direct attachment to a return.
For a director doing 8,000 business miles a year, the relief value can easily exceed £1,000 — entirely lost in most reactive accounting setups.
AI Contract Safeguard
This is the feature our advisory clients use most heavily. Upload a contract — a supplier agreement, a customer master services agreement, a lease, a shareholders' agreement — and the AI Contract Safeguard provides a structured summary of obligations, term lengths, termination provisions, and any clauses that warrant a human review. It is not a replacement for legal advice on material matters; it is a triage tool that helps you spot what you should escalate.
For early-stage businesses without an in-house legal function, this is the difference between signing twenty contracts a quarter blindly and signing them with a basic risk view.
Real-Time Financial Health Dashboard
The dashboard pulls from your underlying accounting platform — Xero or QuickBooks — to provide a live view of cash, debtor days, creditor position, gross margin trend, and tax accrued. Most clients have never had this view before because their accountant produced management accounts quarterly, in arrears, in PDF. The dashboard makes it continuous.
The single most common reaction we hear in onboarding meetings is some version of "I didn't realise we were that close to the VAT registration threshold" or "I had no idea our debtor days had drifted that far." Visibility changes behaviour.
How the App Fits With the Engagement
Critically, the app is not a self-service replacement for the firm — it is an extension of it. The data your clients capture in the app feeds into the workflow your client manager runs. The mileage log goes into your tax return. The receipts go into your bookkeeping. The contract summaries inform our advisory conversations. The dashboard is the dataset we plan against.
That integration is the difference. A standalone app gives you a tool. An app inside a managed engagement gives you a tool plus a team holding the other end of it.
Getting Started
The app is free to download from the App Store and includes a tier accessible to anyone, with full features unlocked for PushDigits clients as part of the engagement. You can read more on the PushDigits app page, or if you would like to discuss how the app fits into a fuller accountancy engagement, book a discovery call with our UK team.
For clients already engaged with our managed bookkeeping or tax planning services, ask your client manager to enable the advanced advisory features on your account.