Reclaiming VAT on Fuel

[RalphD]

Hi all,
My wife is self-employed & would normally have happily used the Flat Rate Scheme to keep VAT matters nice and simple.
However, the Limited Cost Trader rules have meant that she's in the process of switching to the standard scheme.
(wrote the letter to HMRC about a month back, but no reply yet...)

I'm reasonably clear about a number of expenses where we can offset the payment made to HMRC (like agent's commission), but it's less clear on a couple of other things.
This enquiry is mainly concerned with petrol costs. HMRC offer several options, and it looks like we'll need to do the 'claim for business trips' option. (although I admit that I'm still unclear on how the Fuel Scale Charge method works)

Could someone offer some guidance as to how the 'claim for business trips' option works?
In my mind, we need to write down something like "for 5 days this week, the journey from Home to work at X was done, with a total of 200 miles."
Naturally we will obtain VAT receipts for any fuel bought.
But how does the above get processed into an amount of VAT to be reclaimed?

Feel free to point me at a relevant article, if that's easier than writing a lengthy reply - but any useful advice would be appreciated.

Thanks, Ralph

[les35]

HMRC Notice 700/64 explains the options.
The most straightforward option is to retain all fuel receipts, and make a record of business journesys as you suggest. Each month, for example, do a percentage of <business/total miles> to multiply by fuel purchased. And talk to your Accountant as well about this.

[RalphD]

Many thanks for clearing that up.

We may have to do some careful thinking, as we might not have all the historic information needed. But at least we know what to do for the future.
I wish I'd thought about this a couple of months ago...

I will of course mention the change to the accountant, but I had imagined that he wouldn't have any great interest. When we did the FRS calcs and payments, he had no involvement, and I wasn't expecting him to know any more this time (other than what we had actually paid HMRC). Have I missed anything here?

I have another question, which isn't quite in line with the title of the thread, but hopefully the community will be able to help.

I'm sure this could apply to several categories, but I'm wondering how to decide the Private / Business split for a mobile phone.

HMRC just offer the example of "half the phone calls are Private, so you claim 50% of the VAT". So do I just look at the bills & calculate the proportion based on outgoing calls? It seems quite a crude method.

We also have a Data SIM, which obviously has no calls to assess. As this was certainly bought for the business, presumably this can be treated as 100% Business?

(I'm also aware that these are possibly going to be quite small sums of money, so maybe I'll ultimately choose to ignore them. But as I've yet to do the calcs for a non-FRS return, I feel I need to test the options before settling on my general method.)

Thanks again for any advice, thoughts, experience etc.

[les35]

Check out HMRC notice 700, chapter 12A, which deals with this.

[RalphD]

Many thanks again.
Notice 700 does indeed cover it, and a few more of my little uncertainties as well.