Average annual claims for self-employed individuals are over £4,500
Surrey, UK – 29th Jan 2018: IN-SYNC Group.
Go back a decade or two and tracking your business mileage meant keeping shoeboxes brimming with receipts, scraps of paper and scribbled notes – all of which would be strewn across the living room floor when tax season came along. Thankfully, times...and technology have changed and claiming your business mileage is easier than ever with the right tools in place.
It goes without saying that in order to go self-employed successfully, you'll need to work incredibly hard. Throw in a dash of good luck and a good measure of business savvy, and you'll be see the pounds pouring in. But what does business-savvy actually look like? It means working smart to maximise every penny you earn by harnessing all of the tax advantages at your fingertips. This is because HMRC allows you offset some of your business costs each tax year, so long as they are considered ‘allowable expenses’, against your taxable profit. The result? You get to take home more of your money. So, from recording your receipts to tracking your travel, get it right and you’ll feel the benefits in your back pocket.
What is a mileage tracker app?
Smartphones have come along in leaps and bounds during the last decade. With it, new apps have hit the mainstream marketplace with one purpose: To simplify the process of running a business. One particular category that is revolutionising the way self-employed workers manage their travel expenses is the ‘mileage tracker’ or ‘trip logging’.
A mileage tracker app will allow you to automatically track and keep a record of every journey you make. It’s a process that seems incredibly simple, but compare it against manually scribbling your mileage on the back of a napkin, shoving it in your pocket and then storing it away in that shoebox of doom until the end of the tax year, and you can’t go far wrong.
At IN-SYNC Group, we’ve helped self-employed people file their Self Assessments for over a decade. One area that almost always gets neglected is claiming for business journeys. This is because traditionally, it has been the most time consuming and difficult process to record. After all, do you really want to jot down every business-related journey you make? What if you’re running late? What if you’ve got a really busy day? It’s inconvenient and often easily forgotten. With a mileage tracker app, this process is fully automated, saving bundles of time and effort and allowing you to track your mileage more accurately than ever before. Better accuracy, means claiming at the end of the tax year will benefit you more financially.
LOGIT-IN, our mileage tracker, even links directly with our IN-SYNC Tax Self-Assessment and VAT Return services, completely taking away any the administrative headache that usually comes with claiming at the end of the year.
Who needs a mileage tracker?
If you’re a self-employed worker, you’ll no doubt need to travel to and from meetings, jobs or projects from time to time. In some instances, your work may even revolve solely around transportation, such as self-employed taxi drivers or couriers. Any costs you incur are outside of what HMRC consider ‘normal commuting’ (the journeys you make to and from a fixed place of work), allow you to claim tax relief. This is where logging miles effectively can really impact the amount you can claim at the end of the tax year.
What can you claim?
There are a few ways you can claim for vehicle travel, but one of the most straightforward approaches is by tracking and reporting on the number of work-related miles you travel. HMRC will allow you to claim ‘Simplified Mileage’ depending on the number of miles you travel and the type of vehicle you use. The HMRC website shows you what you can claim.
According to the Telegraph, light commercial vehicle (LCV) traffic has risen by 4.1% on average per year, with each van travelling 12,811 miles on average, equating to almost 60% more than the average car. So long as you own the vehicle, at 45p per mile for the first 10,000, along with the additional 25p for additional miles driven, you could potentially claim £4,732.28 against the average van mileage of 12,811. What would that money be worth to you?
What do you need for a valid claim?
In order to make a valid ‘simplified mileage’ claim, you’ll need to keep a record of all the business miles you cover over the course of the tax year. Using a mileage tracker app to claim mileage allowance relief makes this process incredibly simple, especially if you choose an app like LOGIT-IN, designed to create HMRC-ready reports.
It’s important to remember that not everybody is eligible to use this method though – If you’ve already claimed capital allowance for your vehicle or included it within your general business expenses, you won’t be able to claim this way.
How easy is it to setup?
Downloading and registering our mileage tracker app, LOGIT-IN, takes no time at all. Simply go to the Apple App Store or Google Play Store; at the moment, it’s totally free! From there, all you need to do is start driving and LOGIT-IN will start working hard for you in the background. Using your smartphone’s GPS, it’ll track every journey, allowing you to simply categorise each trip as either ‘business’ or ‘personal’ by swiping left or right.
The IN-SYNC Group specialises in self-employed financial services across the UK. From tax and VAT returns, to credit and business outsourcing services, IN-SYNC Group’s mission is to support the self-employed worker.