RogerD1
Employee Tax Expert

Get your taxes done using TurboTax

From the sounds of it, you are doing work as a sole proprietor, reporting your income on a schedule C.  How this non-payment is handled depends on how your business is structured for its accounting.

 

Most sole proprietors use the cash method of accounting.  If this is the method used for your business, then bad debts cannot be written off.  So even though you already have your own time plus all the investment in the parts for the repair, you would have claimed the parts that you used for the repair as expenses on your tax return in the year you made the repair, but you would not have claimed the income because you never received it.

 

If you instead use the accrual method of accounting, you would have reported the income in the year that you earned it, whether or not you had been paid on that account receivable.  In that instance, you would report the bad debt as an "other expense" on your Schedule C.  In TurboTax desktop, this would be under Business Income and Expenses in the category "Other Miscellaneous Expenses".  In that category you will enter a description such as Bad Debt expense and the amount of the bad debt.  For TurboTax online, you would go to Self-employment income under the Income category, and then enter the expense under "Other Miscellaneous Expenses" category.

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