if you're taking a trip and plan to do part of your home-based business on that trip, how much can be written off?

[rnmcd]

Let's say I'm going to Hawaii with plans to do work-related tasks (for a self-proprietorship) and also do some vacationing.

How do I document the portion that I want to deduct on my income taxes?

 

[KLin]

the whole thing if you do enough work. That's a guess though .

 

[RossMAN]

Speaking of tax write offs it's nice to be able to write off a dedicated web server

 

[ggnl]

Originally posted by: KLin
the whole thing if you do enough work. That's a guess though .

That's pretty much it. iirc, you divide the trip up into business and non-business days. A business day is pretty much a day that you do any significant work as well as any travel days. If enough of your vacation consists of business days, you can deduct the whole thing (as long as it's not too extravagant). If it's mainly for pleasure, I think you can prorate it.

If you take anyone else with you, their expenses are non-deductible. And the rules are different for international travel.

Of course there are all kinds of loopholes and requirements involved.

 

[rnmcd]

Originally posted by: ggnl

Originally posted by: KLin
the whole thing if you do enough work. That's a guess though .

That's pretty much it. iirc, you divide the trip up into business and non-business days. A business day is pretty much a day that you do any significant work as well as any travel days. If enough of your vacation consists of business days, you can deduct the whole thing (as long as it's not too extravagant). If it's mainly for pleasure, I think you can prorate it.

If you take anyone else with you, their expenses are non-deductible. And the rules are different for international travel.

Of course there are all kinds of loopholes and requirements involved.

What about the travel costs to get there? Let's say that I do a full-day of work on 50% of the days I'm there. Does that translate into being able to write-off 50% of the travel costs (i.e., airfare)?

thanks.

 

[rnmcd]

any CPAs around?

 

[Nuriko]

It's sort of complicated. It depends on if the primarily purpose of the trip is business or if it is a personal trip with some business on the side. If the former, then you can deduct the transportation costs to and from as well as loding and a few other catergories; if the latter, then you can only deduct the costs directly attribuatble to the business days, like lodging.

The expenses will be for AGI and will be put on your schedule C. As far as documentation, you will need to keep the recipts (and it would be a good idea to write down on them what exact they were for or how they were related to the business; like dinner with a VP to discuss your product, etc).