The technology investment boost allows small businesses a 20% bonus deduction on technology expenditure that supports their digital operations and digitising their operations. It is a broad measure and is intended to cover a wide range of business expenses and assets; however, your clients may have questions about what they can claim.
While we can’t provide an exhaustive list of eligible expenditure, a good indicator of eligibility is to consider if the small business would have incurred the expense if they didn’t operate digitally. That is, if they hadn’t sought to adopt digital technologies in the running of their business. Using this rule of thumb, the costs below are eligible:
- advice about digitising a business
- leasing digital equipment
- repairs and improvements to eligible assets that aren’t capital works.
Whether some expenditure is eligible for the boost will depend on its purpose and its link to digitising the operations of the specific small business. For example, the cost of a multifunction printer would not be eligible if it were intended to only make copies of paper documents. However, it would be claimable if being used to convert paper documents for digital use and storage.
New and ongoing subscription costs can also qualify as eligible expenditure if it relates to your clients’ digital operations. For example, your clients’ ongoing subscription to an accounting software platform for their business would qualify. Likewise, a new subscription for digital content that is used in developing web content to advertise their business would be eligible.
In these cases, businesses should keep explanations of how the expenses relate to digitising their business, as well as accurate records of all their claims.
Consider which expenses are claimable under the technology investment boost.