NRLA Portfolio: how it works with Taxd for MTD
If you're an NRLA member, you may already use Portfolio to manage your rental properties. This article explains what Portfolio, PortfolioPlus and PortfolioPro each do, what they cost, and — most importantly — exactly how they connect to Taxd to get your Making Tax Digital (MTD) submissions filed with HMRC.
What is Portfolio?
Portfolio is a property management platform built by the NRLA. It comes in three tiers:
| Portfolio | PortfolioPlus | PortfolioPro | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Included with NRLA membership | £5/month for NRLA members | £11/month for NRLA members |
| Manage tenancies and property details | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Track rent payments | Yes (manual) | Yes, automated | Yes, automated |
| Keep MTD-compliant digital records | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Connect your bank automatically (Open Banking) | No | Yes | Yes |
| Transactions categorise themselves | No | Yes | Yes |
| Submit quarterly MTD updates to HMRC | No | No | Yes |
| File your annual tax return | No | No | Yes, if you've paid for 12 months upfront — see below |
| Split ownership for joint properties | No | No | Yes |
A few things worth being clear on with anyone asking about pricing:
- These prices assume you're already an NRLA member — Portfolio itself is included with membership, and the £5/£11 prices are the added cost of Plus/Pro on top of that. The pricing shown publicly on the NRLA website reflects this member pricing.
- On PortfolioPro, the annual Self Assessment return is only included automatically if you pay for your PortfolioPro subscription across a full 12 months. If you're not on a 12-month plan, the annual return isn't automatically bundled in.
How does Portfolio actually connect to Taxd?
This is the part that causes the most confusion, so here's the short version: whichever tier you're on, Taxd is what actually files your MTD submissions with HMRC. Portfolio's job is keeping your digital records (property income and expenses); Taxd's job is turning those records into compliant quarterly updates and an annual return, and submitting them to HMRC.
- On Portfolio (the free base tier) and PortfolioPlus, you keep your records in Portfolio, then connect to Taxd separately to file — the same way a landlord using our spreadsheet templates or Keptd would.
- On PortfolioPro, this happens automatically: Portfolio is set up to hand your records straight to Taxd, so it looks and feels like Portfolio is "doing it all," but the actual submission engine behind PortfolioPro's MTD service is Taxd. As Portfolio's own help content puts it: "We've partnered with Taxd, a specialist tax platform, to deliver a compliant and seamless MTD experience directly within Portfolio."
So if a client asks "do I still need Taxd if I have PortfolioPro?" — yes, they're already using Taxd, it's just embedded inside their Portfolio experience rather than something they log into separately day-to-day (though they can still access their Taxd account directly to review submissions or their tax history).
Connecting Portfolio to Taxd: the setup journey
Inside Portfolio, go to Finance > Making Tax Digital. You'll see a 3-step setup journey:
- Register with HMRC for MTD. Use your Self Assessment Government Gateway user ID and password (the same login you use to file Self Assessment online) to sign up directly with HMRC for Making Tax Digital for Income Tax, and confirm you'll be using compatible software.
- Sign in or register with Taxd, and connect your Taxd account to Portfolio.
- Set up your Taxd account for MTD — this is the same process as connecting any Taxd account to HMRC:
- Enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) on your Taxd account.
- Enter your National Insurance Number.
- Connect Taxd to your HMRC account (the OAuth-style HMRC login and permission screen).
Once this is done, the income and expenses already recorded in Portfolio automatically feed into MTD submissions via Taxd — so it's worth double-checking your Portfolio records are accurate and complete before connecting, since this is the data that gets filed.
What happens after setup
Once connected, you'll be prompted to submit quarterly updates at the end of each reporting period, with reminders inside Portfolio so you don't miss a deadline. Your Taxd account stays available in parallel if you want to review past submissions or your tax history directly.
Data and security
Portfolio's bank connections (used for automatic categorisation on Plus and Pro) run through MoneyHub, a regulated Open Banking provider — protected by bank-level encryption and FCA regulation, with access revocable at any time. Your bank login details are never shared with Portfolio or Taxd.
Data shared between Portfolio and Taxd is transferred over encrypted connections. Taxd is an HMRC-recognised software provider, and only the information needed for tax submissions is shared — neither the NRLA nor Taxd sell or share this data with third parties.
Getting help
For Portfolio product questions (adding properties, tenancies, bank connections), use Portfolio's own help centre. For anything about your tax position or HMRC account specifically, Taxd's support team can help — this is the same team a landlord using our spreadsheet templates would contact.
Common questions we see
Do I need to keep using Taxd's dashboard if I'm on PortfolioPro? Not day-to-day, but it's there if you want it. PortfolioPro is designed so submissions happen from within Portfolio, but the account connecting to HMRC is still your Taxd account, and you can log into it directly any time to check on things.
Can I switch tiers later without losing my data? Yes — moving from Portfolio to PortfolioPlus keeps everything you've already entered, and all PortfolioPlus features work with data added while on the base tier.
What happens to my Portfolio and Taxd data if I cancel my NRLA membership? Portfolio data is retained for 12 months after your NRLA membership ends, and you can reactivate to pick up where you left off. After 12 months it's deleted.
Why does something look different in Portfolio than it does in my own Taxd account? Portfolio wraps the same underlying Taxd MTD engine in its own interface, so some screens (particularly around HMRC connection and MFA) will look like the Taxd flow you'd see if you connected directly, just presented inside Portfolio's design.
I jointly own a property with someone who isn't on PortfolioPro — how do they file their share? MTD treats each of you as separate taxpayers, so your co-owner reports their own share of the income and needs their own way to file it — they don't need their own PortfolioPro subscription to do this. The simplest route: export a CSV of the property's records from PortfolioPro, and your co-owner submits that through their own Taxd account. Taxd's pricing for a co-owner filing this way (rather than through PortfolioPro) is £6/month for quarterly MTD submissions only, £10/month for quarterly submissions plus the end-of-year return, or a one-off £99 covering everything for the year. As with any bridging setup, they'll need to bring their CSV data into Taxd's own template structure rather than uploading it as-is — see our guide to Taxd's MTD spreadsheet templates.