Client uses kitchen diner for office work. When calculating the number of rooms to apportion the home costs the kitchen is normally excluded. In this case would I include it as a room?
Why not just use the £4 per week or the simplified tax approach based on time?
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
For self employed but not employee's/directors that why I gave both options as you didn't specify the legal staus of the business (sorry, I should have made it clearer why I included both options).
For self employed you can use simplified expenses which depends on the numbers of hours a month that you work from home.
For employee's who have to work from home or company directors then the £4 per week is still available.
If your client works more than 100 hours a month from home then the simplified expenses may prove better.
HTH,
Shaun.
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
she doesn't. she just does her invoicing. it's coming out at about £200 for the year so the £4 a week would have been great. So can I count the kitchen diner as a room when looking at the number of rooms in the house?
You could calculate based on total floor area but regardless as to what the figure comes out at HMRC would apply a reasonableness test which would include how material the charge is compared to turnover.
The flow of that seems to be that for minimum usage provided that you come in at the simplified rate or less then they are fine with that provided that the client is spending at least 25 hours a month using the workspace otherwise nothing is available.
All your client has to justify is 12 hours a week to have £18 per month allowable (£216 per year)... Don't know about you but I manage more than that a day.
Its not unreasonable of HMRC to expect people claiming tax relief for use of home to actually use their home for work so I can quite see their 25 hour minimum rule and the tiered effect of the amount of time that one spends working.
The crux of the above is that yes you can use the floor area including the kitchen but it will still be compared to hours, materialarity and reasonableness in the event of a review.
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
