This is general information, not personalised tax advice. Check irs.gov or your accountant for your specific situation.
Most contractors claim the big, obvious costs — materials, fuel, sub payments. It's the smaller, easy-to-forget categories that quietly cost people money every year, simply because nobody thought to log them as business expenses in the first place.
Small tools and consumables
Blades, screws, sealant, fasteners bought in small quantities rather than a big supply-house order — these rarely get logged because no single receipt feels worth tracking. Add them up over a year and it's often a meaningful sum sitting unclaimed.
PPE and workwear
Steel-toe boots, hi-vis, safety glasses, weather gear for outdoor work — genuine deductible costs, often bought without a thought to keeping the receipt.
A proportion of phone and admin costs
If your phone's used for the business as well as personally, a reasonable business-use proportion of the bill is deductible — many contractors simply never claim any of it because it feels like "just a phone bill," not a business cost.
Training and certifications
Course fees, license renewals, and required trade credentials directly related to your work are generally deductible — including continuing education to maintain an existing license.
Bank fees and finance costs
Business account fees, and interest on financing used to buy tools or a work vehicle, are often deductible but rarely tracked as a distinct cost.
Home office space
If part of your home is genuinely used for business admin — bidding, invoicing, ordering — a proportion of related running costs can generally be claimed via the home office deduction, using either the simplified or actual-expense method.
Why these get missed
The pattern is the same every time: it's not that contractors don't spend the money, it's that the receipt never gets tagged as a business cost. A $10 pack of fasteners from the hardware store doesn't feel like "the books" the way a $500 supply-house invoice does — but the IRS doesn't care about the size of the receipt, only whether it's a genuine, ordinary and necessary business expense with the paperwork to back it up.
The fix is capture habit, not memory
Nobody remembers every small purchase from six months ago at tax time. The fix isn't trying harder to remember — it's scanning every receipt the moment it happens, regardless of size, so nothing small gets silently dropped. That's the same habit covered in our guide on job costing for Schedule C.
FAQ
Is it worth tracking a $5 receipt?
Individually, no. Across a year of dozens of small purchases, yes — it adds up to real money, and the effort to log it digitally is a couple of seconds either way.
What if I've never claimed any of this before?
Talk to a tax professional about whether prior years can be amended — but the more useful fix is making sure it doesn't keep happening going forward.
Do these need separate receipts from materials?
No — they can sit in the same system as everything else, tagged to the right category, as long as they're captured at all.