What HMRC Will Actually Let You Claim (And What Gets You a Letter)
- Consulting Hive
- Aug 3
- 2 min read
Someone always tells you their cousin claims their whole car as a business expense and "HMRC's never said a word." Maybe. Or maybe the letter's just not arrived yet.
Let's go through what's actually true.
Your coffee doesn't count. This surprises more people than it should. If you're working from a café and buy a flat white, that's not a business expense just because you happened to open your laptop nearby — it's food and drink you'd be having anyway, meeting or not. HMRC calls it personal subsistence. It's one of the most common things that gets adjusted when someone's return gets a closer look.
There's a real exception though: if you're actually travelling for work — a proper trip, not a wander to the corner shop — subsistence on that trip is usually fine. The Tuesday latte five minutes from your desk isn't a business trip, however much you'd like it to be.
Round numbers are a bit of a tell, too. £500 for travel, £1,000 for equipment, same figures every single year — it looks suspiciously neat. Real spending has odd pennies in it. £487.32 looks like something that actually happened; a clean £500 repeated annually looks like a guess someone stopped checking on. Keep the receipts and let the numbers stay a bit messy, because that's honestly what real ones look like.
There's also a bigger shift coming that's easy to miss if you're not already dealing with it. If you're a sole trader or landlord turning over more than £50,000, this April is when the shoebox-of-receipts approach officially stops being an option. Making Tax Digital for Income Tax kicks in — digital records, quarterly updates to HMRC, not a once-a-year scramble in January. The threshold drops to £30,000 the year after. Worth sorting your system out before it's mandatory rather than after.
And then there's the stuff that's easy to just... forget. A £10 expense you don't bother logging because it felt too small — postage, parking, a software subscription you pay monthly and never think about — doesn't feel like much on its own. Add it up over a year and it's genuinely a few hundred pounds quietly missing from your records, and real tax you didn't need to pay.
If there's one rule underneath all of this: HMRC's actual test is whether something was incurred "wholly and exclusively" for business. That doesn't mean it has to have zero personal benefit at all — just that the main reason for it was business. Everything else people argue about eventually comes back to that one line.
This isn't a substitute for someone actually looking at your numbers — general rules only get you so far before your specific situation matters more. If you'd rather talk it through properly, Consulting Hive's ICAEW Chartered Accountants are happy to have that conversation before HMRC does!
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