This is general information, not personalised tax advice. Check gov.uk or your accountant for your specific situation.
Most tradesmen claim the big, obvious costs — materials, fuel, sub-contractor 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, drill bits, sealant, tape, screws bought in ones and twos rather than a big trade 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.
Protective clothing and workwear
Steel-toe boots, hi-vis, branded workwear, safety glasses — genuine business costs, and often bought without a thought to keeping the receipt.
A proportion of phone and admin costs
If your phone is used for the business as well as personally, a reasonable business-use proportion of the bill is allowable — many tradesmen simply never claim any of it because it feels like "just a phone bill," not a business cost.
Training and certifications
Course fees, certification renewals, and required trade qualifications directly related to the work you do are generally allowable — including refresher courses to maintain an existing certification.
Bank charges and finance costs
Business account fees, and interest on finance used to buy tools or a vehicle for the business, are often allowable but rarely tracked as a distinct cost.
Home admin space
If part of your home is genuinely used for business admin — quoting, invoicing, ordering — a reasonable proportion of related household costs can be claimed using HMRC's simplified flat rates or an actual-cost calculation.
Why these get missed
The pattern is the same every time: it's not that tradesmen don't spend the money, it's that the receipt never gets tagged as a business cost. A £15 pack of drill bits from a hardware shop doesn't feel like "the books" the way a £600 merchant invoice does — but HMRC doesn't care about the size of the receipt, only whether it's a genuine, wholly-and-exclusively business cost.
The fix is capture habit, not memory
Nobody remembers every small purchase from March by the following January. 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 tracking job costs for Self Assessment and CIS.
FAQ
Is it worth tracking a £3 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 an accountant about whether prior years can be adjusted — 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.