Disallowable travel expenses

Hi there, @richieaustin. I'm here to share information about how QuickBooks Self-Employed (QBSE) handles tracking your travel expenses.

QBSE uses the Simplified Expenses (with flat rates) method to calculate the allowable business expenses for your car, van, or motorcycle. And in this method, there are expenses that you can't claim, like vehicle insurance, repairs and servicing, or fuel costs. But, you can claim all other travel expenses in addition to your simplified expense amount.

Thus, you'll categorise a transaction as travel expense when it's your train, bus, air, and taxi fares, as well as lodging and food costs while travelling overnight. Then, car/van expenses if it's vehicle expenses like insurance, repairs, servicing, fuel, and parking. For more information, see this article: About Car, Van, and Travel Expenses. 

To ensure you'll be able to categorise your transactions accordingly so you can claim allowable expenses, I recommend consulting your accountant. They can guide you accurately when tracking your travel expenses.

In addition, to learn more about calculating your allowable expenses and business expenses for vehicles, I would encourage you to check out these articles:

• Check if simplified expenses could save your business money
• Simplified expenses if you're self-employed

Fill me in if you have additional questions about expenses in QuickBooks. I'm always here to help. Take care always.   

im talking about hotels unfortunately your reply doesnt really help me 

Hello again, @richieaustin. 

Hotel/meal costs on overnight business trips should show under allowable expenses. Since it displays as disallowable on your end, you may have categorised it as car/van expenses. As I've mentioned above, you'll have to categorise hotel/meal expenses as travel expenses for the costs you've incurred when traveling. To verify, let's double-check how you categorised your transactions.

You can run the Self-Assessment Summary to see the breakdown of £1251. To pull this up, here's how:

1. On your QBSE account, select Taxes in the left menu.
2. Set the Tax year.
3. Go to the Business expense section.
4. Locate Car, van and travel expenses.
5. Click the £1251 hyperlink under the Disallowable expenses column.

From there, you'll be routed to the Transactions page. You'll see transactions categorise as Travel expenses and Car/van expenses. Then, sum up all the transactions under the Car/van expenses category. If it totals £1251, that's the reason why it's showing as disallowable. To correct this, you'll have to change it to Travel expenses.  

You can also consider exporting your transactions into a CSV file for detailed list. For more information, check this article: Export transactions and get reports in QuickBooks Self-Employed.

In addition, you can read through this article to learn more about the allowable and disallowable expenses in QBSE: About SA103F Categories.

I'll be here if you have follow-up concerns about this or should you need anything else, @richieaustin. Have a good day.

Nope all are under travel expenses, all marked as business Travel and rule set to mark them all under that category