FLOW SHORTS: What your expenses your company can actually claim
Updated: 2 days ago
Every director asks the same question sooner or later: can I put this through the company? The test never changes — was the cost incurred wholly and exclusively for the business? A private element means either no claim, or a claim for the business proportion only, and paying for something personal usually lands the director with a benefit in kind charge instead.
Two things changed for 2026/27: the mileage rate has risen for the first time in fifteen years, and the flat-rate working-from-home claim employees used to make direct to HMRC has gone.
The headline numbers:
Phones — one company mobile or SIM per employee is tax and NI free, but only on a contract between the company and the network, not a personal contract the company reimburses.
Laptops and equipment — usually relieved in full in the year via the Annual Investment Allowance; incidental private use doesn't create a benefit in kind.
Home office — the company can still pay £6 a week tax free through payroll; the employee's own direct claim to HMRC ended on 6 April 2026.
Software and subscriptions — allowable where used for the trade, taken out in the company's name and paid on the company card.
Entertaining — client entertaining is never deductible and the VAT is never recoverable; staff entertaining is different, up to £150 a head a year, tax free.
Travel — 55p a mile for the first 10,000 business miles, then 25p, but not for ordinary commuting to a permanent workplace.
R&D — everyday development costs are deductible as incurred; work resolving genuine scientific or technological uncertainty may also qualify for relief under the merged scheme.
The costs that cause trouble are rarely the obvious ones — they're the dual-purpose items: the phone contract still in your own name, the broadband you already had, the software you also use at weekends. Getting the paperwork right when you buy it is far cheaper than arguing about it two years later.
Not sure which side of the line a cost falls on? Book a free discovery call: https://calendly.com/flowaccandtax/discoverycall
Figures apply for 2026/27; this is general guidance, not advice for a specific business.
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