If you ever worked in a job where you traveled for business, you may be aware of the concept of per diems. Many companies will cover their employees travel expense by paying a fixed amount per day to reimburse the employee for meals and incidental expense while traveling for work. When a company has a written per diem plan and follows certain guidelines on the amount of reimbursements, the IRS does not require the company or employee to keep receipts for every meal or expense.
Later this month the commissioner of the IRS will release a revenue procedure which extends the concept of per diems to self employed workers. Much like the mileage deduction, you can now use the federal per diem rates to track your travel expenses rather than keeping up with all the receipts when you are traveling for business. You need to keep track of how many days you are away from home on business and multiply the daily rate times the number of days you were traveling. You may want to create a separate expense category in Outright.com for per diems, to help you keep track of your deduction for travel expense. There is an option to use per diem rates for all travel expenses including lodging, meals and incidentals or just for meals and incidentals. The per diem rates can be found on the US General Service Administration website.
