How I calculate my tax return expenses 🔢
Top tips before the January 31st deadline
Scrabbling around for receipts? Trying to understand what you can and can’t claim for? Spending hours on the phone waiting to speak to an HMRC advisor? Yep - it’s that fear-inducing time of year again. Tax self-assessment month.
There are just two weeks to go to file and pay your tax return (in the UK). This means all your earnings from April 2023 to March 2024 need to be accounted for. You also need to calculate how much you have spent on expenses to offset your tax bill - and reduce it to a more manageable amount.
It can be tricky to get your head around what qualifies as expenses - and you may see differing advice online. HMRC has guidelines here which are a great starting point but it may still seem a little bewildering.
We thought the best way to help freelancers visualise what an expenses spreadsheet might look like, would be to show you one. So today I am sharing my expenses from the current tax year (remember this is 2023-24) and explaining how and why I claim for certain items. These have all been signed off by my accountant as I put them together over the summer to avoid the January panic.
The spreadsheet includes everything from notebooks to magazine subscriptions to mileage to electricity bills. Plus books, stamps, payments to interns, apps, training, website fees and a new PC.