topic Confused about calling a hard drive a "supply expense" on schedule C photography business in Business & farm

Confused about calling a hard drive a "supply expense" on schedule C photography business

crash345u — Fri, 28 Feb 2020 16:53:59 GMT

Why does Turbotax say that "Supplies Expenses" includes an external hard drive. This does not seem to belong under this category. Is it because it costs less than $200? But it lasts more than a year.

Let's enter the supplies expenses for your Photography work

Computer accessories (external hard drives, trackpads, mouse, cords, etc.)

Supply expenses are incidental items that usually cost less than $200 and last less than a year. Examples include:

Computer accessories, like external hard drives, trackpads, mouse, and cords

Re: Confused about calling a hard drive a "supply expense" on schedule C photography business

ColeenD3 — Fri, 28 Feb 2020 17:52:39 GMT

This is not an official source I would normally use, but it seems to agree with the spirit of the deduction.

Exception #2: if the item has a value of less than $500, most accountants will expense it because the cost of tracking that asset over its useful life is just too burdensome, time consuming and costly. And the IRS agrees with that. So an external hard drive would last more than a year (hopefully) but cost less than $500, so it’s just worth everybody’s time to expense that puppy.

Expense asset

Re: Confused about calling a hard drive a "supply expense" on schedule C photography business

Anonymous — Fri, 28 Feb 2020 22:23:03 GMT

did you import from quickbooks because that's where the classification could arise? for $200 you could categorize it as whatever you want. Or if you want to be super safe treat it as an asset addition and then take 100% bonus which will result in a 200 depreciation deduction rate than a 200 deduction somewhere else on schedule C.