multiple businesses, multiple home offices in one apartment

galapagoensis
galapagoensis Member Posts: 1 Newcomer
edited February 25 in Credits/Deductions

Hi everyone,

I have one business (sole proprietor) and my spouse has two businesses, also sole proprietorships. We each have a home office in our apartment, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to calculate the home office deduction. I could use the simplified method but looking at past returns that were completed by a professional I see that our deductions would be significantly higher if we use the actual expense method. However, from this article, it looks like FreeTaxUSA doesn't support this use case:

How do I deduct the home office expense if I have more than one business in the same home office? - FreeTaxUSA Community

"Under the actual expense method, you would need to figure out the percentage of time that the office space was used for each business. Then the usage percentage of each is applied to every home office expense in each separate business. NOTE: Currently, our software doesn’t support reporting the home office expense for multiple businesses using the actual expense method."

I wanted to confirm if that's in fact true. If so, I guess it doesn't make sense to use FreeTaxUSA if I'm going to lose out on a big deduction, right? I've added the three businesses and walked through the home office deduction sections and the software hasn't stopped me.

Comments

  • KeriC
    KeriC FreeTaxUSA Agent Posts: 186

    @galapagoensis yes, at this time, our software does not support this. If you wish to use the actual expense method for your multiple businesses, you won't be able to use our software to file, unfortunately.