ANNA tax tools

What it is

ANNA continuously estimates your tax position rather than skimming a fixed percentage. As income lands and expenses are categorised, the figure moves. You open the app and see what you actually owe, not what a blunt rule guessed.

Alongside it sits automated receipt capture and matching, expense categorisation, and prompts chasing the receipts you have not supplied.

How it actually works

• Live estimate. Recalculated as transactions arrive, rather than a percentage of gross income set once.
• Receipt capture. Photograph it and ANNA matches it to the transaction and pulls out the values.
• Chasing. It nags you for missing receipts, which is unglamorous and probably the single most valuable part.
• Filing support is available, with the level depending on your plan.
• All of the core tooling is on the free Pay As You Go tier.

Who it genuinely helps

• Sole traders who file their own Self Assessment. This is precisely who it was built for, and for them it is the best product in the market.
• Anyone drowning in receipts — the capture and chasing is more automated than anything a bank offers.
• People who find tax genuinely anxiety-inducing. A live number is worth more than a quarterly guess.

Where it falls short

• No FSCS protection on the everyday balance. The single biggest mark against it.
• An estimate is not a filing. It is very good at telling you the number, not at being your accountant.
• Less relevant if you have a bookkeeper on Xero — most of what makes ANNA distinctive goes unused.
• Transfer allowances are limited on the free tier, then charged per item.

What else does this

Monzo Tax Pots skim a fixed percentage into a pot. Cruder, but on a licensed bank — and behind a £9 subscription.

Mettle has an in-app tax estimate plus pots with automatic rules, free, and is FSCS-protected via NatWest. This is the closest thing to ANNA on a licensed bank.

Starling’s free Accounting Essentials covers MTD and bookkeeping but does not do live tax estimation.

Our verdict

The most useful single feature we have reviewed, and close to unique. Everyone else does a version of tax setting-aside; ANNA is the only one that continuously answers the actual question. For a self-employed person with no bookkeeper, that removes a genuine, recurring source of anxiety.

The problem is what it is bolted to. Best-in-class tooling sits on the weakest deposit protection in our table, and we do not think an app compensates for the absence of a statutory guarantee.

The sensible answer is both. Hold a licensed bank account for the money and the tax reserve, and run ANNA’s free tier alongside it for the tooling. Both cost nothing, and you get the feature without the exposure. That is how we would use it.

Read our full ANNA Money review →