You may have heard it before: \u2018Do you send the invoice because it’s on business\u2019 or \u2018Can I have the restaurant receipt for my accounts\u2019. It sometimes seems that, for a self-employed person, there are only deductible costs for their bookkeeping. Especially as a self-employed person starting out, you may therefore already be in doubt whether something is allowed in your accounts or not.
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Broadly speaking, a professional expense is an expense that is useful for your self-employed activities. The tax authorities define it a little more formally as \u2018A tax-deductible professional expense serves to maintain or increase your turnover\u2019.
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Of course, that still leaves a lot of room for interpretation and there will always be. After all, it is up to you to demonstrate (in case of tax inspection) why a certain expense was useful for your self-employed activities. For some expenses this is obvious, for other expenses you might have to provide some explanation.
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If you have made an expense and are hesitant to stop the receipt or invoice in your accounts, ask yourself the next question: if I do the same expense as an employee, but for my employer’s company, would my employer pay back this expense?
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If the answer is yes, then you already have a solid indication that that expense is indeed allowed in your own accounts as a professional expense.
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