What Can I Claim?

Every entrepreneur is different, and some can be too generous and allow their company to take advantage whist others use the company’s finance as a personal line of credit.

You may work a lot from home so a fair ‘Use of Home as Office’ on your tax return or charge to the Limited Company should be considered.

Mobile Phones if the phone isn’t the property of the company this can be tricky because of the duel benefit and separating what is personal and business use, also you may need to justify the % if the HMRC were to enquire.

Travelling rules for Sole Traders are a little different than being employed by a Limited Company. Your place of work or base of operations where you carry out most of your work, travel between home and base are not allowable. It starts to become complicated and case law is still developing, this is why you need to keep a log of your business journeys, this is why we recommend using Tripcatcher a handy app that helps you log business mileage just by hitting a button.

Subsistence, a fair cost of food and drink can be claimed as an expense generally by travelling to a place or staying away on business there are conditions that need to be met for these costs to be tax deductable.

Entertaining your customers or suppliers isn’t deductable against tax; it is still treated as an expense on the Profit and Loss report, however entertaining employees is treated as staff welfare so is allowable for tax purposes. There are other circumstances where entertaining can become deductable for example a room hired for an event.

Accommodation can be claimed as long as this is wholly and exclusively for the purpose of business or if there is mixed private and business use, a proportional claim for the business related expenses needs to be calculated.