Do I have to split deductions between my two similar lines of business? Or will it be okay to deduct everything from one and have no deductions for the other?

[jhernandez1034]

Im a musician as well as run my own booking agency. I used the self employed Quickbooks app and it tracked ALL deductions from both my gas & travel as performer and expenses like website and marketing for my agency. If i take all the deductions under my primary line of work "musician" and show no deductions under "talent agent" will it even out? or would i have to separate the expenses?

[MinhT1]

When you're running two businesses that are taxed as sole proprietorships, the Internal Revenue Service requires you to report the income and expenses of each business separately.

So practically you should split expenses between your business. For common expenses, as long as you have a rule that you use to split the expenses, that would be acceptable to the IRS.

[Opus 17]

You are required to keep your business income and expenses separate.

Sometimes, your business activities might overlap so much that you would list them on one schedule C.  Driving for Lyft, Uber and Doordash, for example, are all basically ride-sharing.  Or lawn care and house power washing could basically overlap under "home exterior services."

The first question is, is there enough overlap between being a performer and an agency for performers, to be combined as one business.  I don't know the answer, but you already said two businesses, so it sounds like you have determined they are different.  If they are different, you need to have separate schedule Cs for each business, and each schedule C should list the income and expenses for that business only.