For example I go to Home Depot to purchase items for my business, but I also purchase items for personal use. I can certainly deduct the items I purchased for the business. Can I also deduct the mileage? If not, can I deduct part of the mileage? How do I allocate the mileage to business vs personal if using the standard mileage deduction?
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If you incur an expense (mileage) in the process of meeting both personal and business needs, it is usually not deductible for business purposes. There is a presumption that the expense would have been incurred to meet your personal needs, whether or not there was an additional "business" benefit.
Individual facts and circumstances may, however, make a dual-purpose trip deducible.
In cases such as you described, I would ask "what was the primary reason for your trip to Home Depot - to buy business supplies or meet personal needs?" If I purchased $5000 of building supplies for my home repair business and $50 for personal home project supplies, then the entire trip would have been "business". Conversely, I could not justify a business purpose if I was at Home Depot for personal home project supplies and remembered that I needed a network cable for my home office.
However you decide to allocate these costs (or not), be consistent from trip to trip. For example - divide the mileage equally between business & personal.
If you incur an expense (mileage) in the process of meeting both personal and business needs, it is usually not deductible for business purposes. There is a presumption that the expense would have been incurred to meet your personal needs, whether or not there was an additional "business" benefit.
Individual facts and circumstances may, however, make a dual-purpose trip deducible.
In cases such as you described, I would ask "what was the primary reason for your trip to Home Depot - to buy business supplies or meet personal needs?" If I purchased $5000 of building supplies for my home repair business and $50 for personal home project supplies, then the entire trip would have been "business". Conversely, I could not justify a business purpose if I was at Home Depot for personal home project supplies and remembered that I needed a network cable for my home office.
However you decide to allocate these costs (or not), be consistent from trip to trip. For example - divide the mileage equally between business & personal.
Your Home Depot example is good. Generally, the IRS likes some kind of method for allocating the dual-use cost. In this case, I would suggest to keep records of your mileage and how much you spent at the destination, and then use that to calculate "equivalent mileage". For example, if your round-trip mileage to Home Depot is 20 miles, and if $150 of a total $200 purchase was a business expense, then the mileage to enter into TurboTax would be 20 x 150/200 = 15 miles.
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