Charity work and lost receipts!

tomematthews

Hi there,

I have a couple of queries:

1) I have just done a charity disco for a community centre on the Isles of Scilly. It cost me £110 to get over here, and I received no payment for the disco (they paid me £18 for the songs I had to download, but didn't pay my travel expenses or any other payment for doing the disco)... Can I claim the £110 travel expenses against my tax return?

2) I have lost a couple of receipts for other work travel expenses. However, I have found the amounts on my debit card statement (and they state the name of the travel company). Can I still put this in against my tax? If so, how would I go about providing evidence that this is legitimate (i.e. would I have to include my debit card statement?)

Thanks in advance!!!

chrismac1

1) Is this a genuine business or a mere hobby? For example, are you registered with HMRC for self-employment? If it is a genuine business, is there a commercial reason why it is doing work for no payment? If so, then the expenses could be claimable.

2) When you say "other work travel expenses" what exactly is the trade? Self-employed DJ? or some other sort of work not mentioned so far. If you are self-employed and filling in a tax return, my advice to clients is that strictly receipts are necessary - which is pretty stupid in these days of the internet, HMRC will probably suss out the internet in 20 years time when everyone else has moved on. However, providing I believe a genuine business expense has been incurred - for example there is evidence from the bank statement - I am happy to put together accounts with these as expenses.

If there are a lot of them, I put in writing to the client the risk they are running if they ever should get an enquiry or inspection. This is not so great where the supplier is a large company - they must keep their records for 6 years, and if necessary you could get them to supply a copy invoice at short notice, even using the DPA if necessary to force them to. Where the supplier is only a small guy this sort of later request for the invoice is much less likely to be successful, so in the case of large missing invoices I encourage clients to phone them right now and get the missing evidence if possible. An especially good time to make this sort of request is the moment the small supplier calls you wanting to place a sales order! "Happy to place the order mate, but you still haven't sent me a sales invoice for last month yet...."