Most missed deductions are not caused by not knowing the rules. They are caused by the expense never looking like an expense in the moment.
Most missed deductions are not caused by not knowing the rules. They are caused by the expense never looking like an expense in the moment. A bank fee buried in a statement, a laptop bought two years ago, a subscription renewal that goes out quietly every January, none of these arrive with a receipt marked business, so none of them get captured. Here are seven that catch freelancers, contractors, and sole proprietors out most often.
If you work from a dedicated space in your home used regularly and exclusively for your business, a portion of your rent or bond interest, rates, and electricity can be claimed. The deduction is worked out by dividing the area of your home office in square metres by the total area of your home, then applying that percentage to your qualifying costs for the year.
It is easy to miss simply because there is no single invoice for it. Nobody sends you a bill labelled home office. You have to calculate it yourself, once, and then apply it consistently.
Freelancers and sole proprietors claim actual vehicle costs, meaning fuel, maintenance, insurance, licence fees, and finance costs, apportioned by the business-use percentage from a travel log.
Monthly account fees, transaction charges, card fees, and interest on a dedicated business account are all deductible business expenses. Because they are small and automatic, deducted quietly every month without anyone actively deciding to spend the money, they are one of the easiest costs to overlook entirely when a return is put together at the end of the year.
This one is not a business expense, but it is one of the most valuable deductions available to self-employed people, and one of the most commonly forgotten, precisely because there is no employer payroll system prompting the contribution or reflecting it automatically anywhere.
Freelancers who contribute to a retirement annuity but never actually claim the deduction on their return are leaving a significant reduction in taxable income on the table.
A laptop, camera, or other equipment bought for the business is not only deductible in the year it was purchased. Its cost is written off over a number of years according to SARS's prescribed periods for that type of asset, which means a computer bought two tax years ago may still have a wear and tear allowance available to claim this year.
Freelancers often claim the full cost once, in the year of purchase, and then forget the asset exists for tax purposes in every year after that.
Where a phone or data contract is used for both personal and business purposes, the business-use portion is deductible based on a reasonable split. Because the bill looks identical every month and reads as a personal expense, this is one of the most consistently under-claimed costs among freelancers who work primarily from a phone or laptop.
Software tools, cloud storage, professional body membership, and industry subscriptions are all deductible where they relate to earning your income. The most common way this one slips through is timing. A subscription billed annually in a month nobody thinks about tax, or one that was cancelled partway through the year, is easy to forget entirely unless there is a running record of what was paid and when.
None of these deductions are obscure or aggressive. Every one of them is a straightforward, legitimate cost of running a business. What they have in common is that none of them arrive as an obvious, one-off, clearly labelled business receipt.
The fix is not more tax knowledge. It is a running record that captures these costs as they happen, rather than trying to remember all seven of them from scratch under deadline pressure.
MyExpense keeps a running record of recurring, automatic and calculated costs, so the ones that usually slip through are already captured.
This article is general information and is not tax or legal advice. Tax rules, thresholds and filing requirements can change. Confirm your specific obligations with SARS or a registered tax practitioner before filing.