HMRC Already Has Your Income Data. Here Is How to File When You Kept No Record

If you kept no records during the 2025/26 tax year, you can still file an accurate Self Assessment return. Bank statements show almost every payment received and most business expenses paid. Platform reports confirm the gross income HMRC already holds from eBay, Etsy, Vinted, Depop and Amazon. Email receipts fill the gaps. A reconstruction from these sources produces valid records and is far safer than filing on a guess.

Bank statements, platform reports and email receipts hold most of what you need. Working through them takes a focused weekend. What you end up with is a complete set of records that supports every figure on your Self Assessment return and is far safer than filing on a rough guess. HMRC already has your gross income figures from the platforms you sold on. Your return needs to match them.

Marcus has been selling on eBay and Depop full time since October 2025. Sourcing, pricing, turning stock over fast all of that he does well. The admin? Not so much. He meant to start a spreadsheet in April 2026. He did not. He told himself he would track expenses as he went. He did not do that either. He has a vague sense of what came in, a vaguer sense of what went out; postage, packaging, petrol, a storage unit and nothing written down anywhere.

January 2027 is close enough now that it feels real. And Marcus is far from alone. A lot of sole traders hit their first serious engagement with Self Assessment without a single organised record to show for it. The question is not whether to file. It is how to get from nothing to something accurate.

The answer is a reconstruction. It is more achievable than it sounds.

What HMRC Already Knows

Before you touch a bank statement, it helps to know where HMRC already stands.

Under DAC7 reporting rules, digital platforms; eBay, Etsy, Vinted, Depop, Amazon, Airbnb and others send seller income data directly to HMRC. For 2025/26 that transfer has already happened. HMRC holds a gross sales figure for every seller who hit the reporting threshold on each platform.

Two things follow from this.

First, your declared income has to line up with what the platforms reported. The most common mismatch is sellers declaring the net payout, after fees rather than the gross amount before fees. eBay reported the gross figure. Your return should too. The fees come off separately as an allowable expense.

Second, there is nothing to gain from under-reporting. The data sits on HMRC's side whether your return reflects it or not. A gap between what the platform reported and what you declared is exactly the kind of thing that prompts a closer look. The reconstruction is your chance to match the income figure with every legitimate expense bringing taxable profit down to the right number, not a convenient one.

Where Your Records Actually Are

The assumption that nothing was kept is almost always an overstatement. Records exist. They are scattered, not absent.

Bank statements. Every business payment received by transfer and every expense paid by card shows up here. For a reseller that means PayPal payouts, direct buyer payments and all postage, packaging, stock and storage costs settled by card. Download twelve months as a CSV from your online banking much faster than scrolling through PDF pages.

Platform transaction reports. eBay, Etsy, Vinted, Depop and Amazon all have downloadable reports from the seller dashboard. They show gross sales, fees charged on each transaction and payouts made. Download the report from each platform you used. These reports often go back further than twelve months and take a few minutes to pull.

Email inbox. Search for: invoice, receipt, order confirmation, payment confirmation. Then search by supplier name your packaging company, your storage provider, your postal service. Move everything relevant into a folder called 2025/26 Tax Records. You will find things you had completely forgotten about.

PayPal history. If PayPal was used for buying or selling, the full transaction history is downloadable going back years. This catches expenses settled from a PayPal balance that never touched your bank account postage labels, supplier payments, stock bought at auction.

Phone camera roll. Photographs of receipts are acceptable HMRC evidence. Search April 2025 to March 2026. You will likely find receipts for cash purchases, car boot entry fees and equipment bought in person.

Marcus spent a Saturday morning on this. By midday he had confirmed his gross income, £31,200 from eBay, £4,800 from Depop, both at the gross pre-fee figures from the platform reports. His bank statements covered every postage cost, every packaging supplier payment and his monthly storage direct debit. His email inbox turned up four supplier invoices he had written off as lost.

The Reconstruction: Seven Steps in Order

Work through these in sequence. Each step feeds the next.

Step one — Confirm gross income from every platform. Download the transaction report from every platform used in 2025/26. Note gross sales, what buyers paid, not what arrived in your account. This is your gross self-employment income. It is also the figure HMRC received from the platform. Both need to match your return.

Step two — Add income received outside platforms. Go through bank statements for direct payments, private sales, car boot cash, individual buyer payments outside the platforms. Add these to the platform total.

Step three — Reconstruct expenses from bank statements. Work through every statement from April 2025 to April 2026. Mark every business expense postage, packaging, stock, storage, fuel, market fees, equipment. Enter each one with a date, category and amount. Bank statement evidence is acceptable for routine costs even without a separate receipt.

Step four — Add platform fees as an expense. Your platform reports show what eBay, Depop or Etsy charged on each sale. These are allowable expenses. Take the total fees from each report and enter them as expense rows.

Step five — Reconstruct mileage. If you drove for business to car boots, suppliers, post offices, to collect stock , the HMRC mileage rate of 45p per mile applies to the first 10,000 business miles in 2025/26. Work back through calendar entries, event locations and a realistic estimate of how often you made each journey. An honest estimate with a brief written note of how you calculated it is more credible than leaving the field blank.

Step six — Search email for anything missed. Look for receipts not caught by the bank statement review payments from a PayPal balance, subscriptions on a secondary card, annual costs paid in one hit. Everything found gets added with a date, category and amount.

Step seven — Enter everything into a structured tracker. The reconstruction is only useful when it ends up somewhere organised. The UK Sole Trader Tax Calculator 2025/26 gives you 300 income rows and 300 expense rows across 70 categories. The Reconstruction Guide tab inside the calculator walks through this same process with step-by-step instructions for downloading reports from eBay, Etsy, Vinted, Depop and Amazon. When the trackers are complete the tax calculation runs automatically and the Dashboard shows your January 2027 total.

What HMRC's Record-Keeping Rules Actually Say

HMRC does not prescribe how records must be kept. It requires that you can produce evidence to support every figure on your return if asked. That evidence does not have to be a tidy contemporaneous ledger. Bank statements, platform reports and retrospectively found receipts are all valid.

A bank statement entry proving a postage expense is the same evidence whether you noted it in April 2025 or found it last week. The transaction happened. The statement proves it. The claim stands.

Keep the reconstructed records for at least five years after the 31 January 2027 filing deadline until at least 31 January 2032. Google Drive or a folder on your computer is fine. HMRC can open an enquiry into your 2025/26 return at any point in that window.

One more thing worth knowing before you calculate the total: if your Self Assessment bill comes in above £1,000, HMRC requires a payment on account on top of the main liability due on the same January date. For a reseller with meaningful income, this threshold is easily crossed. The payment on account guide explains how it works and why January ends up larger than most people expect.

What to Do When Evidence Simply Does Not Exist

Some expenses from 2025/26 will be genuinely unrecoverable. Cash purchases with no receipt. Market stall entry fees paid at the gate. Stock bought from private sellers with no invoice. For these, options are limited but not zero.

Write a note before you file. Describe the expense, the approximate date, the amount and how you arrived at the estimate. For recurring costs at a fixed location, weekly market fees at the same venue, for instance, an honest estimate based on known frequency and price, with a note explaining the basis, is a reasonable position.

Do not claim amounts with no genuine basis. The reconstruction should reflect what actually happened.

And if total evidenced expenses fall below £1,000, the £1,000 trading allowance is there as a floor, no supporting evidence required. Most active resellers will do better with actual expenses. But the allowance exists for a reason.

Where Marcus Ended Up

After a weekend working through his sources, Marcus had a complete picture. Gross income: £36,000 — £31,200 from eBay, £4,800 from Depop, both at the pre-fee gross figures. Total expenses: £11,400 — platform fees, postage, packaging, stock from bank statements, storage, mileage to car boots, two supplier invoices from his inbox.

Trading profit: £24,600. Income tax through Self Assessment: £2,406. Class 4 NI: £732. Payment on account: £1,569. Total due 31 January 2027: £4,707.

He had not been saving toward that number. He had guessed around £3,000. The actual figure was higher but every pound of it was real, evidenced and based on every expense he was entitled to claim.

More importantly, he had time to do something about it. He knew the number. He knew the date. He could plan.

That is the difference between a reconstruction and a guess. A guess might be close or it might not. A reconstruction is defensible. And if HMRC ever asks to see your records, defensible is the only thing that matters.

UK Sole Trader Tax Calculator 2025/26 — Structure your reconstruction. Know your exact January bill. £19.99 →