UK Tax - can I claim expenses against a different tax year?
In some circumstances losses from self-employment can be offset against total income and/or capital gains. If this applies to you may be able to claim back some of the tax taken by PAYE from your day job.  You can also to some extent carry the loss backwards into previous tax years or forward into the next one if you can't use it fully this year. HMRC have some information available on the current rules: When you can claim losses  You can claim: But You can’t claim:
Yes, provided you're not over the IRA deductibility limit as well. –  JoeTaxpayer♦ Aug 4 at 18:02 Note that if you get refunded for excess contributions, it usually happens in the following year, in which case it doesn't affect the year where these contributions occured -- rather, the refund counts as taxable income in the year you received the refund. –  user102008 Aug 11 at 8:11 Your tax rate is 20% for turnover below £300000. So deducting your expenses and all the tax your accountant thinks you need to pay is £450. But you can claim relief on your tax payments. Visit the UK gov website to check your options under which you can claim relief. Frankly speaking for such a low turnover you shouldn't have opened a limited company. Or do you expect your turnover to increase in the coming years ? If your turnover isn't going to increase any further or if there isn't going to be a substantial increase, better to go as a sole trader or an umbrella company. This is essentially a reimbursement of your expense. Since you can deduct the expense, the fact that the reimbursement is taxable doesn't affect you much. You deduct your home office expenses on your annual tax return using form 8829. See the IRS site for more details. If you're asking about the UK tax, there may be some other considerations, but from the US tax perspective it is (nearly) a wash. If you use tax software to prepare your taxes, most packages have a planner for the next year.  You could use that. According to HMRC's manual BIM42105, you can't deduct expenses of this kind when calculating your profits for corporation tax: No deduction is allowed for expenditure not incurred wholly and exclusively for trade purposes So at the least, the company will have to pay corporation tax on this donation at some point, assuming it ever makes any profits. There's also the risk that HMRC would say that what is really happening is that you are making a personal donation to this person and the company is giving you income to allow you to do it. In that case, you'd be liable to income tax and employees national insurance, and the company liable to employers national insurance. It should then be deductible from corporation tax, though. Your home doesn't belong to the partnership, it belongs to you. So you can (if qualified) deduct home office usage as a business expense on your individual tax return. Same goes to your partner. Similarly any other unreimbursed expense. In the United States the general policy is that the IRS would consider it income when you have access to the money. I work for a company that has a contract with another company. Near the end of the year I turn in a time card that has my hours that I worked as of that date. Because they don't pay me until early January the money on the check is counted in the new year. I couldn't touch the money until they issued the check. If they had paid me on December 31st it would have counted as the old year, even if I only had a short window to have access to it before the year ended. It would even count as old year money if I held on to the December check, but didn't deposit it until March. So it would become income when you could use it. So If you could access it via a check, or debit card, or transfer it to the bank it is now income. Of course that is in the United States. You would need to see what the situation is in Singapore.... The edge cases always depend on the country. Overcontributions made after the calendar year are not usually a problem. This is because while contributions made in Jan and Feb can be counted towards the previous year, they do not have to be. This appears to be what has happened in your case. If you had an RRSP limit of $18,000 for 2015, and in Jan 2016 you contributed $22,000 to your RRSP, then it is perfectly legal to claim $18,000 of that in 2015 and $4000 in 2016. The extra $4000 is never counted against your 2015 limit and so is not an overcontribution. If your 2016 limit is going to be less than $4000 then you will eventually have an overcontribution problem in 2016, and if you think that's likely you should sort this out now. But for most people that's pretty unlikely. As you're working, you and your spouse were probably born after 1935, so I'll assume that Marriage Allowance is relevant to you rather than Married Couple's Allowance. The allowance applies if your husband or wife earns less than the personal allowance in salary (£10,600/year), and less than £5,000/year in savings interest. For example it's likely this will apply if he or she's not working. Also, you need to be only a basic rate taxpayer, earning less than £42,385/year. In that case they can register online to transfer £1,060 of their personal allowance to you, which will reduce your tax bill by £212/year if you yourself earn more than £1,060 above the personal allowance. This will usually work by HMRC issuing a new tax code to your employer who will then automatically withhold less of your salary. You can't get your employer to do this directly, you have to go via HMRC. The allowance change will be effective as if from the start of the curren tax year in April 2015, so you will probably end up getting the proportion of the £212 that you could have had up till now (from April to August) back all at once in your next pay cheque, or possibly spread out over the rest of the tax year. Apart from that you'll get it spread out evenly over the year - i.e. about £17/month. Assuming you buy the services and products beforehand and then provide them to your clients. Should the cost of these products and services be deducted from my declared income or do I include them and then claim them as allowable expenses? You arrive at your final income after accounting for your incomings and outgoings ?  regularly buys products and services on behalf of clients These are your expenses. invoice them for these costs after These are your earnings. These are not exactly allowable expenses, but more as the cost of doing your business, so it will be deducted from your earnings. There will be other business expenses which you need to deduct from your earnings and then you arrive at your income/profit. So before you arrive at your income all allowable expenses have been deducted. include on my invoices to clients  VAT if you charge VAT. Any charges you require them to pay i.e. credit card charges etc. You don't need to inform clients about any costs you incur for doing your business unless required by law. If you are unsure about something browse the gov.uk website or obtain the services of an accountant. Accounting issues might be costly on your pocket if mistakes are committed. The regulations you're talking about (TR 1.263) are going into effect starting tax year 2016, so for purchases you made last year they're (kindof...) irrelevant. Kindof, because the IRS promises to not audit those that qualify under the regulations even if they use it before it goes into effect, but it doesn't legally have to. Since the regulations are new, I suggest you talk to a licensed professional who'd explain them to you and interpret them with regards to your specific situation. From my brief read, you can expense under these rules things that you would otherwise capitalize, with the $500 limit to the invoice. Meaning, if you bought a computer paying $500, which you use 50% for your business - you can expense $250. The benefit, comparing to the Sec. 179, is that you're not limited to new items, nor are you limited to business revenue. Otherwise, it looks like the applicability is similar. As I said - talk  to a licensed tax adviser (EA/CPA licensed in your State), since these rules are new and untested, and you should probably have a professional provide guidance. I'm not such a professional. Every bill you write counts as income (if the bill doesn't get paid, you would count that as an expense). In cases where you don't write bills, I think the payment you receive would count as income, but you might check that on the HMRC website. So to record your income, you can basically record the payments that you receive.  Anything you pay out for your business is an expense. You keep a receipt for every expense - if you don't have a receipt, you can't count it as an expense, so keeping all the receipts is very, very important. An exception are investments, for example buying a computer that should last multiple years; there you can count a percentage of the investment as expense every year.  All income, minus all expenses, is your profit. You pay tax and National Insurance contributions according to your profit. You can do whatever you like with the profit.  Notice that I didn't mention any salary. Self employed means you have no salary, you have profits and do with them whatever you like. On the other hand, you pay taxes on these profits almost exactly as if they were income.  If you have this blog but are also employed, you'll add the profits to your normal income statement. I spoke to HMRC and they said #1 is not allowable but #2 is. They suggested using either their published exchange rates or I could use another source. I suggested the Bank of England spot rates and that was deemed reasonable and allowable. "The short answer is that the IRS knows this is an issue, so they are prepared to deal with the ""discrepancies.""  The filer does not need to something special to call it to their attention.  Keep good records and consistently report according to your accounting processes.   Exactly how the IRS resolves / flags this, I don't know.  Maybe someone else can answer, but you can imagine that if they track you for multiple years they should have some idea of how many dollars are rolling over and whether you might have ""forgotten"" to report something from a few years ago that happened at a year-end break." As I understand it... Generally housing can't be considered a business expense unless taken at your employer's explicit direction, for the good of the business rather than the employee. Temporary assignment far enough from you home office that commuting or occasional hotel nights are impractical,  maybe.  In other words, if they wouldn't be (at least theoretically) willing to let you put it on an expense account, you probably can't claim it here.