A new study by FreeAgent has found that around £250 million of expenses every year are not being claimed by UK micro-business owners, saying the amounts are too small or time consuming to put into their accounts.
An aggregated sample of 2.5 million expenses with a total of £168 million was logged in by customers in FreeAgent throughout 2015, and it revealed that the average micro-business owner has around £216 worth of expenses, with individual values of £10 or less every year.
A recent survey of 100 web professionals showed that 22% of respondents thought it wasn’t worth claiming any expense that cost £10 or less. Across the 5 million micro-businesses, this equates to approximately £238 million in unclaimed small expenses.
CEO and co-founder of FreeAgent, Ed Molyneux, commented: “Whether it’s £5 or £500, that’s all money which you can claim tax relief on, and in the case of the smaller expenses, it’s also money that quickly adds up.
“We found that nearly one in four micro-business owners wouldn’t claim expenses worth £10 or less, presumably because they’re too small to bother with or it takes too much time to log them, and that suggests hundreds of millions of pounds are gong unclaimed across the whole of the UK.”
Additionally, 39% of those surveyed said they claim all expenses back incurred for their business while 5% say they don’t claim any expenses back whatsoever.
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