Your JoltMile subscription as a claimable expense

What it is

If you pay for JoltMile, each month you pay for shows up in your expenses on its own, marked auto and locked. It is categorised as software and subscriptions, and it counts as claimable. Locked means the amount and the date cannot be edited. You can still remove it, and doing that turns the whole thing off.

Why it is there

Software you pay for to run your business is an allowable expense for a self-employed driver, in the same way accountancy fees are. A JoltMile subscription qualifies, so leaving it out would mean paying tax on money you spent on the business.

Asking you to type it in every month would be asking you to re-key something we have an exact record of, and the figure you typed would be wrong the first time a discount or a plan change moved the price.

Where the figure comes from

Straight off the payment itself, as Apple or Google report it to us. Not a list price and not a constant, so an introductory offer, a plan change and a price rise all land in the entry correctly without anybody doing anything.

The amount is stored in pence and converted for display, so a run of monthly entries adds up to exactly what you paid rather than to a rounding error.

The date is the date the payment went through, which is what decides the tax year it falls in.

What happens when things change

• Change plan: each payment is recorded as it comes, so the entries follow what you were actually charged.
• Cancel: no more entries are created, because there are no more payments. The months you already paid for stay claimed, because you paid for them.
• Cancel at the end of the period: entries keep arriving until the period actually ends, then stop.
• A payment fails: nothing is recorded, because a failed payment is not money out. If a retry succeeds, that is when the entry appears.
• A refund: the entry shrinks by the refunded amount, or disappears entirely if the whole thing came back.

Why you cannot edit it

It mirrors a payment that actually happened. Changing the amount or the date would not change what you were charged, it would only make your tax figures disagree with your bank statement, which is the one thing a record like this must never do.

If an entry looks wrong, the receipt from Apple or Google is the thing to check. Get in touch and we will look at both.

If you do not want it counted

Delete the entry on your Money tab and JoltMile stops adding it. Removing it is a standing decision rather than a one-off tidy-up, because without that the next payment would write the row straight back and you would be deleting the same thing every month. The same switch is under More, then Subscription.

It is still a claimable cost. The reason to turn it off is that you already record subscriptions somewhere else and do not want it counted twice, so if you do turn it off, keep recording it there.

Turning it back on applies to your next payment. Months it was off are not filled in afterwards, so anything you want back has to be entered by hand from your receipts.

VAT

The entry records the amount you actually paid, VAT included, which is what a driver below the VAT threshold claims. Where the store or the invoice gives the VAT portion it is stored alongside, so a VAT-registered driver or their accountant can see the split.

Mistakes to avoid

• Do not add it again by hand. It is already there, and a second entry is a double claim.
• Do not assume it covers other software. Anything else you pay for is an ordinary expense you add yourself.