anyone got any advice on what is allowed as a business expense as part of self employed.

Currently filling in form and it has asked if trading less than 6 months to evidence income(which is easy enough)and expenses(not so easy).

ive kept receipt for most things and havnt as yet appointed an accountant....what do you think they would allow?Petrol?mobile?

regards

Sarah
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Sarah,

The rule of thumb for expenses is that they cannot be deducted in computing trading profits unless they are incurred wholly and exclusively for the purposes of the trade, profession or vocation. Where an expenses is partially for business use and partially from private use then an adjustment must be made to account for the private use e.g. petrol - 70% of your usage of the car is private so you would only put 30% of your petrol costs through the books.

On the subject of petrol and cars there are two approaches to expensing motoring costs. Either put through all the costs of running the car e.g. petro, insurance, servicing etc and adjust for private use or put through 40p per mile for each mile driven for business purposes (falls to 25ppm after 10,000 miles covered in a given year).

Regards.

David.
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Have a look at the notes to the self assessment section 6 which tells you what is allowable and the next section for what isn't:

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/worksheets/sa103f-notes.pdf
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