 Income tax 2022-2023, business expenses, travel and meals. Let's do some wealth preservation with some tax preparation. Support Accounting Instruction by clicking the link below, giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website, broken out by category, further broken out by course. Each course then organized in a logical, reasonable fashion, making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page. We also include added resources such as Excel practice problems, PDF files and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable. So once again, click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it. Most of this information comes from the tax guide for small business for individuals who use Schedule C, Publication 334 Tax Year 2022. You can find on the IRS website, irs.gov, irs.gov. Looking at the income tax formula, we're focused on line one income. Remember in the first half of the income tax formula is in essence an income statement, but just to outline other forms and schedules flowing into these line items, one of those, the Schedule C. Having business income minus business expenses, the business net income flowing in in essence to line one income of our income tax formula. We note that the Schedule C flows into the Schedule 1, which flows into the first page of the form 1040, line number 8. The profit and loss or the Schedule C is called profit or loss from business, having an income statement format, income minus expenses. We're focused on the expenses here related to the travel and meals in particular. Now obviously the travel and meals is kind of a complicated topic because remember our general rule is that we can only have a deduction if it's an ordinary and necessary business item. And when we dive into the concept of meals and travel, we often have that fuzzy gray line between whether or not the meals and travel are necessary business expenses or whether they are personal. We also have had changes in the laws related to meals in particular. So we want to make sure that we do our best to properly allocate the travel and meals. All right, so travel and meals. This section briefly explains the kinds of travel and meal expenses you can deduct on Schedule C, travel expenses. These are the ordinary and necessary. There's those key terms again, remembering that a general expense you would think would be legitimate as a general rule. If it was ordinary and necessary or you needed it, you needed to consume something in order to generate the revenue. So that means we're going to be taxed on the net income as opposed to the gross income, which makes sense from an income tax system. So traveling away from home for your business. So that's a key point there, away from home. So these are the travel expenses. These are ordinary and necessary expenses of traveling away from home for your business. So you are traveling away from home. If both the following conditions are met, your duties require you to be away from the general area of your tax home defined later substantially longer than an ordinary day's work. So it's not just a commuting situation. You're going to be staying somewhere for a longer period of time, usually like an overnight situation. It's required for you to do it. What does that actually mean? Again, there can be kind of shady areas because you might say, hey, I was required to go to the Bahamas because I'm a photographer and I was taking pictures of beach models or something like that. And maybe you were, but that seems still seems kind of like a gray area from the perspective of someone working in the gray IRS office and whatnot. But so obviously what is going to be necessary for travel is going to be dependent upon the type of industry that you are in. So number one, you need to get sleep or rest to meet the demands of your work while away from home. These are the requirements. Number two, generally your tax home is your regular place of business regardless of where you maintain your family home. It includes the entire city or general area in which your business is located. You can see publication 463 for more information there. So the following is a brief discussion of the expenses you can deduct. So we've got the transportation. So now you're going somewhere, plane, bus, whatever you're doing to get there. And it's for work. So you would think then the transportation is legit business related, ordinary and necessary in that case. So you can deduct the cost of travel by airplane, train, bus or car between your home and your business destination. Note that the car gets a little bit messy because then you've got to deal with that whole thing about how are you deducting the cars and the mileage method versus the direct method and whatnot. And then so that gets, but obviously if you're traveling by airplane or train, it's fairly straightforward unless you have a situation where it's partial business, partial work. And then you have that gray area once again. Okay. So taxi, commuter bus, limousine. So you can deduct fares for these and other types of transportation between the airport and station and your hotel or between the hotel and your work location away from home. So baggage and shipping. You can deduct the cost of sending baggage and a sample or display material between your regular and temporary work locations, car or truck. You can deduct the cost of operating and maintaining your vehicle when traveling away from home on business. You can deduct actual expenses or the standard mileage rate. So here we go again with the car, which is a little bit more unusual. Now you're not just doing a commuting thing. You're not just visiting a client in your local area. You're traveling away from home, but using the car to do so as opposed to an airplane and whatnot. So once again, you can deduct actual expenses or the standard mileage rate discussed earlier under car and truck expenses as well as business related tolls and parking. So if you rent a car while away from home on business, you can deduct only the expense use portion of the expenses, the business use portion. So if you rent a car, you're deducting the business use. So meals and lodging. So you can deduct the cost of meals and lodging if your business trip is overnight or long enough that you need to stop for sleep or rest to properly perform your duties. So you can usually, you can use actual expenses or the standard meal allowance to calculate your deduction. So meals are another one that gets a little a little bit tricky. So they actually have like standard meal allowances, which are, which give you a little bit of a somewhat of a safe place to think about what the average meals are because you can imagine the situation where someone is traveling your business traveling and but you're having very extravagant meals, which is way over the top of what you really need to eat to sustain yourself for the business purpose of the meal, which you would think that would be kind of a personal thing as opposed to the business thing. And that's where, you know, great areas come in, same with the method of travel. If you get to deduct the travel, then people will have going first class then and that kind of stuff that that's where the tax code kind of manipulates people's behavior and whatnot in some ways. So in most cases, you can deduct only 50% of your meal expenses. And that was a, I think that's the general idea there being, look, you're going to eat. You would have had to eat the meals anyways. You may have, you may have been able, if you were home to cook your own meals and therefore it would have been cheaper or something. So maybe if you're away from home, you're having to pay for meals which are more expensive. So that I think that's the rationale of why they come to this 50% of meal expenses. So however, business meals are 100% deductible if the meals are food and beverages provided by a restaurant and paid or incurred after December 31st, 2020 and before January 1st, 2023. So you've got this somewhat ambiguity with the meals situation. If you want to dive into that in more detail, you can see publication 463 for additional information. So cleaning, so you can deduct the cost of dry cleaning and laundry while on your business trip because you got to look good. You got to have your suit dry cleaned and whatnot. It's like a uniform. You have to have it, it's got to be ready to roll. Otherwise people don't listen to you. Telephone, you can deduct the cost of business calls while on your business trip, including business communication by fax machine or other communication devices. Tips, you can deduct the tips you pay for any expense in this list. So more information, for more information about travel expenses, you can see publication 463. So reimbursing your employees for expenses. So now you have a situation, you got your schedule C business or whatever your business in, you have employees that are doing the business trip thing and possibly they're spending their own money and you want to pay for it somehow. How are you going to do that? You can have some kind of reimbursement of their business related expenses, right? And then there's going to be some standardization rules that you might be able to follow on these kind of reimbursement type of situations as well because you can imagine when you have a reimbursement situation, people trying to manipulate that kind of situation. So just to give you an idea how that, why that might happen, like if someone goes on a business trip or something like that and they're able to expend extravagantly and you reimburse them for the spending, you get the expense of the reimbursement and you're actually basically paying them over and above what was necessary for just the business trip. So you're kind of giving them wages in that case. So in other words, you can imagine a situation where people are trying to give people wages without being subject to taxes. Social security, right? Because you're kind of giving them income in the fact that you're allowing them to spend extravagantly beyond what would be necessary for the trip. You're reimbursing them for that extravagant kind of behavior. And if it's a reimbursement, it might not be included in income on the W-2, not subject to federal income tax, social security and Medicare. So you can see where there's going to have to be lines that'll be drawn to how this is going to work. So the reimbursement you deduct and the manner in which you deduct it depend in part on whether you would reimburse the expenses under an accountable plan or a non-accountable plan. So you can dive into more detail if you have this reimbursement kind of situation on the difference between the accountable plan and the non-accountable plan. For details, you can see chapter 11 of publication 535. That chapter explains accountable and non-accountable plans and tells you whether to report the reimbursement on your employee's W-2, right? So if you have to report the reimbursement on the W-2, then if it's on line one as income, it might be subject to taxes. So now when you have this reimbursement situation set up, you want to try to do it properly by the books here so that you can maximize the benefits of the reimbursement and properly account for it and do the whole thing. And if you're in that situation, again, take a look at the publication 535. You can find it on the IRS website, irs.gov, irs.gov.