Question of the Day: Managing startup expenses

jiggyme, Tuesday, July 24, 2007 at 3:25 AM PT Comments (0)

I think I am in a fairly typical situation for a Web 2.0 startup. I am the sole founder and developer for my site: I’ve been working on it for the 7 months, and hope to launch a public beta by end of July. For the past 7 months, I have kept my expenses extremely low by doing all the work myself. Nevertheless, I have still accumulated certain expenses.

Now I need to know: What expenses I can deduct from my taxes?

My understanding is that in order for me to deduct my business expenses, I need to have business income. Is this correct?

As a Web 2.0 startup, it’s hard to say if I will generate revenue this year. So I could use some advise from others on how they dealt with business expenses during this pre-revenue/pre-income period, and how they handled them with regard to taxes.

I should mention that I am doing this full-time, with no other job currently, so I have no regular income. I am, however, thinking about selling some stocks so that hopefully I can get some tax relief from my business expenses.

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2 comments so far

July 24th, 2007
7:18 AM PT
bsenftner said:

Perhaps these will help?

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July 24th, 2007
11:01 AM PT
ccampbell said:

I believe we were able to amortize our startup expenses over something like 5 years. So if we spent 100k before launching, we can deduct 20k/year over 5 years.}

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