Tax time has a way of catching sole traders off guard — especially when you've been focused on doing the work rather than the admin behind it. If you're running as an independent NDIS support worker, keeping track of your expenses isn't just useful at tax time. It's the difference between claiming everything you're entitled to and leaving money on the table.
This guide covers what you can actually claim as a sole trader in the NDIS space, how to track it properly, and what mistakes to avoid.
Why Expense Tracking Matters for NDIS Sole Traders
As an independent support worker, you're running a business — even if it doesn't always feel like one. That means you're also responsible for meeting your ATO obligations.
Good NDIS expense tracking matters for three reasons:
Tax deductions. Work-related expenses reduce your taxable income. The more you claim (legitimately), the less you pay. But the ATO expects substantiation — you can't estimate it at the end of the year and hope for the best. You need records.
BAS obligations. If you're registered for GST (required once your annual turnover exceeds $75,000, optional below that), you'll need to lodge Business Activity Statements quarterly or annually. Expenses with GST affect your refund or liability. Without proper records, BAS becomes a guess.
Business clarity. Knowing what you're spending helps you understand whether you're running a profitable business — not just a busy one.
What Can Independent NDIS Support Workers Claim?
The general rule: if an expense is incurred in the course of earning your income and isn't private or domestic in nature, it's deductible. Here's a breakdown of the most common categories for independent support worker tax deductions.
Vehicle and travel
This is usually the biggest one. Travel between clients is claimable. Note that travel from home to your first client — and from your last client back home — is generally treated as a private commute and isn't deductible. Travel between work locations is.
You can use either the logbook method (more admin, potentially larger claim) or the cents-per-kilometre method (simpler, capped at 5,000 km per year). Keep a record every time you travel for work: date, reason for the trip, start and end point, and distance. If you're using the logbook method, you'll need 12 consecutive weeks of records to establish your business-use percentage.
Phone and internet
If you use your personal phone and internet for work — scheduling clients, communicating with plan managers, logging notes — you can claim the work-use portion. You'll need to estimate the split between work and personal use reasonably and be able to justify it if asked.
Professional insurance
Income protection insurance and public liability insurance are both deductible. Most independent support workers need public liability at a minimum — and if you're paying for it, you should be claiming it.
Training and professional development
Courses, certificates, first aid renewals, and any training directly related to your support work are claimable. Keep your receipts and a note of how the training relates to your work.
Personal protective equipment (PPE)
Gloves, masks, and other protective equipment you use for client work are deductible. These are easy to forget — keep a habit of saving receipts for these even when they're small.
Home office expenses
If you do admin from home — shift notes, invoicing, client management — you may be able to claim a portion of your home running costs. The ATO has a simplified fixed-rate method (currently 67 cents per hour worked from home) that makes this straightforward to calculate without needing to apportion individual bills.
Subscriptions and software
Any platform you use to manage your business — shift notes tools, invoicing software, scheduling apps — is claimable. Keep a record of what you pay and what it's used for.
How to Track Your Expenses
Knowing what you can claim is half the battle. The other half is having the records to back it up.
Keep every receipt. Digital copies are fine — you don't need paper. A photo on your phone the moment you buy something works perfectly. The key is capturing receipts at the time, not hunting for them in June.
Categorise as you go. Trying to sort a year's worth of transactions into categories at tax time is genuinely miserable. Spend two minutes after each expense to log it in the right category. It's an hour saved every time you do it.
Track regularly, not annually. A weekly or fortnightly habit — even just five minutes — keeps things manageable. The alternative is an annual panic.
Separate your business and personal finances. A dedicated business bank account makes everything significantly cleaner. You're not legally required to have one as a sole trader, but it removes a lot of ambiguity when it comes time to sort your records. When every business transaction is in one place, nothing gets missed.
Common Mistakes That Cost You at Tax Time
Mixing personal and business expenses. When everything runs through one account, work expenses get buried in personal transactions. You miss deductions, and sorting the year's records takes twice as long.
Forgetting small recurring expenses. A $15 monthly subscription is $180 per year. PPE items are a few dollars each. None of these feel significant in the moment — but they're legitimate deductions, and they add up.
No records, no claim. The ATO doesn't take your word for it. If you can't substantiate an expense with a receipt, bank record, or invoice, you can't claim it. The record-keeping needs to happen in real time.
Waiting until July to start. By then, receipts are gone, transactions are buried, and your memory of what a particular payment was for has faded. The records happen in the moment or they don't happen at all.
Keeping Everything in One Place
One thing that makes NDIS expense tracking harder than it needs to be is having your business admin spread across multiple tools. Shift notes in one place, invoices generated somewhere else, expenses tracked in a spreadsheet (or not tracked at all). When tax time comes, you're pulling information from three or four different places to piece together a picture of your business.
Kareroo keeps your shift notes, invoices, and expense tracking in the same platform. You log expenses as they happen — categorised and with a note attached — and they sit alongside the rest of your records. When your accountant asks for your business expenses, you pull one report instead of reconstructing a year from scattered sources.
Key Takeaways
- As a sole trader, your work-related expenses reduce your taxable income — but only if you have records to support the claim
- The biggest deductions for most independent support workers are vehicle travel, phone and internet, insurance, training, and PPE
- Track expenses as they happen, keep digital receipts, and separate your business and personal spending
- Waiting until tax time to sort your records is the most common mistake — and the most avoidable one
If you want NDIS expense tracking alongside your shift notes and invoicing in one place, Kareroo is built for exactly that. Free to try for 14 days, no card required.