Capital or an expense? Larger buys worth asking aboutNew
Buy a van or a £1,800 press tool and it may be capital rather than an expense. TaskMyJob raises it and deliberately stops there — your accountant decides.
Written 23 October 2026
Buy a box of fittings and it is an expense. Buy a van and it is probably not — it is an asset, and it goes through your books a different way over several years. TaskMyJob flags the larger buys so the question gets asked. It does not answer it, and that is deliberate rather than a gap.
Step by step
- 1
Record costs as normal, with the right category.
- 2
Watch for the note on vehicles, equipment and tools.
Anything over your threshold gets a line saying your accountant may want to treat it as an asset rather than an expense.
- 3
Read the card at the top of the page.
How many of these there are in total, and what they come to, so you can hand your accountant a list rather than a shrug.
- 4
Ask your accountant. They decide.
That is the step the app will not do for you.
Worth knowing
Why the app will not just tell you
Whether something is capital depends on what it replaced, whether it extended the life of something you already had, your own capitalisation policy, and which reliefs you are claiming. None of that is in TaskMyJob. A product that labelled it “capital” would be making a tax decision on your behalf with a fraction of the facts, and you would be the one answering for it.
TaskMyJob does not file anything with HMRC
It is not HMRC-recognised and it submits nothing. What it does is keep the records a professional needs and raise the questions worth asking.
Only three categories, and that is on purpose
Vehicles, equipment and tools — where a lasting thing gets bought. A £5,000 month of subcontractors is a large cost and is never capital, and flagging it would teach you to ignore the flag.
A bill with no amount is admitted, not passed over
If you have not keyed the figures in, the app cannot compare it to anything — so it says it cannot tell, rather than quietly treating it as under the threshold.
The threshold is yours
There is no statutory figure — HMRC does not set one, and a capitalisation policy is your business's own. The app starts at £500 and says that figure on screen, so you can see what is triggering the prompt and change it if your accountant works to a different one.