Today I was on a HMRC Course on “Becoming Self Employed”. Now I’ve been self-employed for a number of years, but I was recommended to go on the course to learn about what expenses are tax-deductible. The advantages of going on one of these courses is that you can ask all the questions that are specific to your business. I found that I now truly understand what I can legitimately claim when I do a tax return.

I’ve now been on 2 courses, and I thoroughly recommend them both:

• Becoming Self Employed
• Self assessment for self-employed people

All courses that HMRC provide are free of charge because they want to encourage people to correctly complete their self-assessment tax returns. It saves hassle for both them and you.

Anyway, here are the highlights of what I learnt (in addition to what I already knew). Please don’t treat these words as gospel, I suggest you talk to HMRC on official guidelines.

• Meals – all of your own meals when you’re away from home on business are claimable as expenditure. As expected, alcohol is not claimable. Additionally, costs for entertaining clients are also not claimable.
• Car Travel – there is a simple way to claim for costs incurred by business-related driving. Rather than keep all receipts for servicing, tax, insurance and fuel for a car, you can claim a per-mile rate instead. For the current tax year, this works out as £0.42 a mile. You just need to keep a log of all business trips. All other business travel is claimable as expenditure (taxi, bus, train, plane, etc).
• Computers – You can claim some relief on them, even if you use them for personal and business use. Basically you claim them as a capital expense (as opposed to the easier-to-understand revenue expense). There’s a lot to know about capital expenditure, so I’ll leave you to find out more.

For anyone who has a business (online or otherwise), I strongly recommend the HMRC courses to ensure you only pay the tax you need to. I firmly believe that everyone should pay their way, that’s why I believe that tax is a good thing. However, I don’t want to pay more than my fair share.