Deductible expenses when working from home

Every day there are more self-employed, the nature of their profession, they operate from home. They use a room as workplace, preparing office furniture, computer equipment and telephone, with which they can begin to perform their daily activities.

Professionals such as lawyers, consultants, designers, programmers or community managers, among others, are those who often choose a part of your home to work. To all of them usually comes to them from the beginning the same question: What expenses can I deduct if I work in my home?

Being discharged my house as my official address

When we decided to work from home, either at the same time that we give high autonomous or at a later time, it is always necessary to register our address in the census declaration if we deductions a number of expenses of our business.

Also, you have to decide at that time the space we will use, and therefore leave affection to our economic activity. For example, if it is a room, we are talking about 10 to 20 square meters, outlining the percentage represented this space from the rest of the house.

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Requirements for a deductible expense

In general, for an autonomous may consider any deductible expenses, they must meet certain requirements set by the Treasury, regardless of whether the activity takes place at home, in a room or an office:

• The expenses must be related to the economic activity that develops autonomous, and must be required to obtain income.
• The expenses must be justified by invoices in accordance with current regulations billing.
• The autonomous must have these recorded in the corresponding book expenses and investment costs, a requirement that resolved without difficulty through its billing software.

What expenses can be deducted autonomous working at home?

If we work in a shop or office, it is usually easy to determine what costs are linked directly to say local and which are not. However, when working at home, it is not possible to attribute many of these expenses only to business, but share them with everyday household activity, and sometimes it is difficult to separate the consumption of one thing and another.

If the house is owned by the autonomous performing the activity, we deductions corresponding to financial charges (i.e. interest), always in the percentage that have declared pertaining to our professional activity in the census register, and the amortization appropriate according to the accounting tables and other expenses such as property tax, the community or insurance.

If the home of the self is rented, and we do not want problems, the first step should be to have the lease of our well-drafted housing, since it is necessary to have a contract for the space we use to develop activity and one for the rest of the house. Once this is done, we could rent deductions affected applying the percentage that we put in the contract and in the census declaration.

In both cases, for supplies of water, electricity or gas, the criterion of Finance has usually been more inflexible. Will be more difficult to demonstrate what the consumption and what the activity of our home, which could be solved easily counters having light, water or telephone lines or separate Internet.

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In relation to all this legal uncertainty, and to the differences between the criteria of the taxpayer and the treasury, against the criteria of the administration, giving rise to self-employed who work from home can be deducted from income tax supplies, raising a combined criterion for calculating square meters with working days and hours activity when the activity is exercised.

Advantages and disadvantages of working at home

It is clear that when we decided to work from home do it for several reasons, among which are economic savings, that can be us especially if we use accounting software and online billing and our ability to better reconcile work and family life.

However, if we do not organize well, we can see diminished our productivity or discover that there is still much legal uncertainty about what expenses deductions can and which are not, having, when in doubt, to leave some expenses without impacting our economic activity.