This is general information, not personalised tax advice. Check ato.gov.au or your accountant for your specific situation.
Most tradies claim the big, obvious costs — materials, fuel, subbie 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, 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.
PPE and workwear
Hi-vis, steel-caps, safety glasses, sun protection 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 tradies simply never claim any of it because it feels like "just a phone bill," not a business cost.
Training and licence renewals
Course fees, licence renewals, and required trade certifications directly related to your work are generally deductible — including refresher courses to maintain an existing ticket.
Bank fees and finance costs
Business account fees, and interest on finance used to buy tools or a work vehicle, are often deductible but rarely tracked as a distinct cost.
Home office and admin space
If part of your home is genuinely used for business admin — quoting, invoicing, ordering — a proportion of related running costs can generally be claimed, using either the ATO's fixed rate method or actual costs.
Why these get missed
The pattern is the same every time: it's not that tradies don't spend the money, it's that the receipt never gets tagged as a business cost. A $12 pack of drill bits from Bunnings doesn't feel like "the books" the way a $600 supplier invoice does — but the ATO doesn't care about the size of the receipt, only whether it's a genuine 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 tracking job costs for BAS and GST time.
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 registered tax agent 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.