Ledgers vs Coconut

First, something worth knowing: Coconut and GoSimpleTax are the same company

GoSimpleTax acquired Coconut in April 2023. If you are shortlisting both, you are comparing two front doors to one house rather than two independent options — GoSimpleTax's own MTD plan is sold as “sign up via Coconut”, at the same £12.99 a month Coconut charges directly. That is worth knowing before you treat them as two separate quotes, and it is the sort of thing a comparison page ought to tell you. See the GoSimpleTax comparison.

It files MTD-ITSA today, and we do not

Coconut is HMRC-recognised for MTD for Income Tax digital record-keeping and quarterly submissions, and it has been doing it in the market for some time. If you are mandated from April 2026 and want a tool that is already filing rather than one that intends to, that is a decisive, here-and-now advantage. We would rather say so plainly than bury it.

Mobile-first, and genuinely simple

Coconut is a phone app designed for people who are not accountants: connect a bank, snap a receipt, categorise, watch a live tax estimate. For a single-trade sole trader with a few dozen transactions a month, that low-friction experience is hard to beat, and a general ledger is honestly more machinery than the job needs.

A real accountant network behind it

Coconut has an established accountant platform with partner and franchise arrangements, so firms know how to service it at volume. If your accountant already works in Coconut, the path of least resistance is a genuine argument, and switching costs are real costs.

Two years free if you bank with Zempler

Open a Zempler business account from inside the app and Coconut is free for two years. If you were going to open a business account anyway and Zempler suits you, that is a materially better deal than anything we offer at the same tier — with the obvious caveat that it ties your software to your choice of bank.

Your books reconcile, because they are books

Coconut is a bookkeeping-and-estimate app, not a double-entry system. Ledgers keeps balanced journal entries with integrity checks that cross-check the reports against the ledger, so a trial balance ties out and a balance sheet balances. That matters the day your affairs stop fitting on an SA103 — an incorporation, a second income source, a lender or an investor asking for statutory-grade numbers — because you are already on foundations rather than a categorised list you have to convert.

You are not assumed to have an accountant

Coconut's model leans accountant-mediated: it is sold heavily to firms, and the workflow assumes someone reviews or recodes your data. Ledgers is built for the person who does not have that. Agents categorise every transaction and never leave a line blank; you approve the edges in a glass-box view that shows why each call was made. Keep an accountant for year-end if you want one — you just are not dependent on one to know where you stand on a Tuesday.

Free without a bank tie, and free tools before you sign up

Coconut's free route runs through a Zempler account, and the paid ladder starts at £49.99 a year for bridging that still charges another £49.99 for the year-end declaration. Ledgers has a genuine free tier on any bank, plus public tools — MTD scope checker, tax and deadline calculators — you can use without an account at all. You can find out where you stand before you pay anyone anything.

One system as you grow, not a migration

Coconut is deliberately scoped to sole traders and landlords. If you incorporate, take on payroll, register for VAT or start needing CIS300s and Companies House deadlines tracked, that is a migration — and migrating books is the single most painful thing in this category. Ledgers covers VAT, payroll, CIS, fixed assets and year-end on the same ledger you started with.

Is Coconut HMRC-recognised for MTD for Income Tax?

Yes. Coconut is recognised for MTD-ITSA digital record-keeping and quarterly submissions, and says so on its own pricing page. Ledgers is not yet on that list for ITSA, which is the single strongest reason to choose Coconut over us today.

What does Coconut actually cost?

As checked on their pricing page: MTD Bridging is £49.99 a year and covers quarterly updates from a spreadsheet, with the year-end declaration a further £49.99 when you need it. MTD filing is £12.99 a month or £129.99 a year and includes the year-end declaration. There is a 14-day trial with no card, and a free-for-two-years route if you open a Zempler account in the app.

Is Coconut the same as GoSimpleTax?

Same company. GoSimpleTax acquired Coconut in April 2023, and GoSimpleTax's MTD plan is sold as 'sign up via Coconut' at the same £12.99 a month. If both are on your shortlist, you are choosing between two routes to one product rather than two competitors.

I am a landlord with several properties. Which one?

Coconut if your affairs are property-only, light, and you want the shortest path to a compliant quarterly update — it handles per-property tracking and SA105 and it files today. Ledgers if the properties sit alongside a trade, a company, or anything that needs a real balance sheet.

Can I move from Coconut to Ledgers later?

Yes, and the honest caveat is that any move between bookkeeping tools costs you something. Coconut holds categorised transactions rather than a double-entry ledger, so what transfers cleanly is the transaction history and the categorisation; opening balances need setting up deliberately. We would rather you knew that before you started than discovered it at year-end.