If you have just started a business, you may have incurred expenses before your business incorporation or before you started trading as part of your setup cost. You may be entitled to claim expenses over seven years before the incorporation of a company - however, because Coconut uses transactions from your connected bank feeds for this information, you may be unable to include those transactions in the relevant tax year.
In cases like these, you'll want to make a 'copy' of the transaction, using a manual adjustment, to include the expense in the tax year it should belong to.
You'll want to ensure that:
The date of the manual adjustment is inclusive of the tax year you want the transaction to be considered
You categorise the transaction accurately
You include notes on the transaction that reference the original transaction or that indicate it is a pre-trading expense that has occurred in a different year
You attach any relevant receipts or documentation to the transaction
Once you're done, you can save the manual the adjustment and it will appear in your transaction list alongside your transactions from the bank feeds and be included in the tax figures for the year you indicated. You'll always be able to amend and/or delete the adjustment if you find anything wrong.
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