If you are somehow associated with the business world, you do know the seriousness of handling weekly, monthly, and annually paperwork as a ritual of bookkeeping. Sometimes you find yourself stuck in a challenge after discovering that you have missed some receipts of expenses that you have incurred. Can you Claim Tax Relief if you lose a Receipt?
Since you have an understanding of allowable expenses when you have to work on your tax returns but you must have heard that without the receipt in hand, it is not possible to claim the amount spent on your business expenses. This case can be easily handled if there is a chance of other supporting pieces of evidence. According to HMRC, there is the requirement of all your business records. The evidence you will need to make a claim includes the following:
- Bank Statements
- Receipts for services and products
- Cheque stubs
Before we delve into further discussion, let’s have a look at the focused points in this article:
- The receipt is Not Always Needed
- Ways to Improve Receipt Records
- The Bottom Line
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Can You Claim Tax Relief if You lose a Receipt?
The recommended practice for hassle-free processing is to ensure that invoices and receipts are all recorded, however, this is not possible all the time. Moreover, it depends on the type, frequency and level of the business expenditure that can tell you that whether you need a receipt to claim tax relief or not.
Some examples are discussed below for further explanation:
Cash Payments:
We all make cash payments and experience losing the receipt which we keep in coat pockets or we bury them in the personal shopping records to never see the light again. Many of the receipts are faded away in the pockets and are never good enough to describe the details. Does this sound familiar to you?
Do you wonder that if there is no receipt, there is no claim? No, this is not the case always. According to HMRC, small cash expenses can be claimed even if you can’t sustain the receipt. HMRC offers a detailed guide on how to make it possible, as well.
“Sometimes you may not get evidence such as a receipt for cash expenses, especially where the amounts are small. If this happens, you should make a brief note as soon as you can of the amount you spent, when you spent it and what it was for”
Online Subscriptions:
If Xero, Dropbox or Microsoft are being used for online subscriptions, this means you are making the regular payments through this. If you possibly can show the evidence of this amount going out of your account, losing some of the receipts won’t hurdle to make a claim of such expenses.
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Ways to Improve Receipt Records:
There are multiple ways that can help to improve your record-keeping, some of them are explained below:
Bank Statement:
It is a best practice to check receipts of bank statements quite often. This record can help to have evidence of the expenses that have no invoices or receipts. If you consider all the online payments that were made by you on Amazon or other online providers. This bank reconciliation will help to keep low paperwork.
Expense Recording – Applications:
In case, you experience the use of online accounting apps like Xero, KashFlow, or QuickBooks, there is an offer of online recording of the expenses that you are spending your amount on. Such applications help to keep an automatic log of your payments.
Bookkeeping:
It is all about the paperwork that you do to maintain the record of your daily business expenses. The more you will minimise the time between recording the expenses and spending them, the more it allows keeping a memory of the small expense details.
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The Bottom Line:
Now that you have developed a better understanding of how to claim tax relief if your receipt record is lost, we can sum up the discussion by saying that it is recommended to get into a routine where you can keep track of checking your bank statement and paperwork. This can help to avoid the hassle of not having any evidence of the business expenses.
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Disclaimer: This article intends to provide general information based on how to claim tax relief if there is no record of receipt.
