Each tool tackles a question UK business owners are asking right now
UKCV
We’ve added five new free tools to the UK Creative Ventures Free Business Tools hub. Each one tackles a question UK business owners are asking right now: whether Making Tax Digital applies to you, what the 2026 business rates revaluation means for your bill, how much to charge a client who pays late, what salary sacrifice really saves, and whether AI search tools can even see your website.
All five are free, need no sign-up, and run in your browser. Here’s what each one does and who it’s for.
The Five New Tools
Making Tax Digital Checker
For sole traders and landlords
Making Tax Digital for Income Tax started on 6 April 2026. If your qualifying income was more than £50,000 in 2024-25, you should already be keeping digital records and sending quarterly updates to HMRC. The threshold then drops to £30,000 from April 2027 and £20,000 from April 2028, bringing many more sole traders and landlords into the rules each year.
The part that catches people out is what counts as “qualifying income”. It’s your self-employment and property income before expenses, not your profit. So a landlord with £35,000 of rent and £20,000 of costs is judged on the £35,000.
The checker asks a few questions about your income sources and tells you:
- whether you need MTD, and from which date
- whether you might be exempt
- your quarterly update deadlines (7 August, 7 November, 7 February and 7 May), as a calendar file you can download
- a readiness checklist for software, records and your accountant
Business Rates Calculator 2026/27
For businesses in England that pay business rates
The April 2026 revaluation changed rateable values across England, and the government replaced the old two multipliers with five. Smaller retail, hospitality and leisure properties now pay a lower multiplier from 38.2p, while properties with a rateable value of £500,000 or more pay a higher one. For many businesses the new bill looks very different from last year’s, in either direction.
Enter your rateable value and property type, and the calculator estimates your 2026/27 bill with:
- the correct new multiplier for your property
- Small Business Rate Relief (100% up to £12,000 rateable value, tapering to £15,000)
- transitional relief, which limits how fast bills can rise after a revaluation
- a side-by-side comparison with your 2025/26 bill
It’s an estimate, and your council’s bill is always the final figure, but it tells you quickly whether your bill looks right and which reliefs to ask about.
Late Payment Interest Calculator
For any business invoicing other businesses
Under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act, you can charge statutory interest on overdue business invoices at 8% above the Bank of England base rate. That’s currently 11.75% a year. You can also add fixed compensation of £40, £70 or £100 per invoice, depending on its size. Most small businesses never claim it, often because they don’t know how to work it out.
The calculator takes the invoice amount and due date and gives you:
- the statutory interest owed so far
- the compensation amount for that invoice
- a ready-to-send chasing email with the figures filled in
Even if you choose not to charge the interest, showing a client what they could owe is often enough to get paid.
Salary Sacrifice Pension Calculator
For employees and employers
Salary sacrifice lets you swap part of your salary for extra pension contributions, saving income tax and National Insurance, and often student loan repayments too. Your employer saves 15% employer NI on the amount sacrificed.
That’s changing. From April 2029, only the first £2,000 a year of salary-sacrificed pension contributions will be free of National Insurance. Income tax relief stays the same, and your employer’s own contributions aren’t affected.
The calculator covers 2026/27 rates for the rest of the UK and Scotland and shows:
- your take-home pay with and without salary sacrifice
- your tax, NI and student loan savings
- what your employer saves
- how the 2029 £2,000 cap changes the numbers
- the effect on the £100,000 personal allowance taper and the High Income Child Benefit Charge
AI Search Visibility Checker
For any business with a website
More people now find businesses by asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot or Google’s AI Mode. But these tools can only recommend your business if their crawlers are allowed to read your site, and many websites block them without realising. Some hosting and security settings block AI bots by default.
There’s also a distinction most site owners miss. Each AI company runs separate bots for training and for search. You can block your content from being used to train AI models while still letting AI search tools find and cite you. For example, OpenAI’s GPTBot collects training data, while OAI-SearchBot powers ChatGPT search.
Paste in your robots.txt and the checker:
- shows which of 25 AI and search bots can reach your site
- writes a corrected robots.txt based on what you want to allow
- gives you prompts to test what AI tools currently say about your business
- generates business schema and an llms.txt file
How we keep the tools accurate
Every tool is built from GOV.UK, HMRC and official company documentation, and each one shows when its figures were last checked. We review the tax and business rates tools every April when the new rates start, the late payment rate every January and July when the base rate reference date changes, and the AI crawler list every three months, because new bots appear often.
The results are estimates for general guidance, not professional advice. For important decisions, check the figures with your accountant or adviser.
Explore all 21 free tools
These five join our existing calculators for take-home pay, VAT, corporation tax, dividends vs salary, redundancy pay, the true cost of an employee, ROAS, customer acquisition cost, break-even and more.
Browse the Free Business Tools hubNeed help acting on the numbers? Our Bristol team works with UK businesses on marketing, AI search visibility and recruitment. Book a free consultation.
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