Tax Return - Do Paypal tests count as income?

Happyclappy

Hi all!

I have a small, on-line business and am building up to completing my first tax return. I just have a few questions if anyone can help??

My boyfriend's a programmer so helped me out, obviously not charging me. This included running some live tests in Paypal. Most of these were before I officially started my business, with one test more recently when I had some system problems. So, he used his own Paypal account to make pretend bookings in the live Paypal system and I just gave him the cash to cover his expenses. Paypal also charged me its normal fees.

So, I'm now wondering how I treat these as even though they were tests, they look like real bookings in my Paypal account (except that they're all clearly in my bf's name.) So, do I have to treat them as income and then claim the reimbursement and fees as expenses? Or, can I forget the income / reimbursement bit and just claim the fees as expenses?

Many thanks everyone and Happy Christmas!

swbrua

can't help with your issue (although I assume you can call it a business expense, but I'm not sure) but I will tell you that paypal have a testing api, you create a fake account and can decide the balance (up to $10k) and use that to test, so you don't need to ever pay "real money".

Happyclappy

Hi and thanks for the reply. Yes, I do know about that but we were (and are) new to using the Paypal system and found it quite difficult to use. We included quite a lot of personal extras and weren't sure if they were working properly, and actually, they weren't when we tested it, which meant we had to test it quite a few times.