Bookkeeping Tip of the Day 1 of 10 – Phone Expenses

If your home phone is also your business phone, take the time each month to go through your phone bill with a highlighter and highlight all of your long distance business calls.  You get to write off a portion of your basic phone charges if you work from home, but this is a small amount, even over the course of a year.  Your long distance charges must be separated out.  Highlight them and make an abbreviated note about who the call is to, if it is not obvious.  Many small businesses lose this as a business write off because at the end of the year they can’t remember which calls were for business, and your bookkeeper won’t write off any of them, because there is no way for her to tell which calls were for business.