What can you actually claim?

The three answers everyone knows

Ask around and you'll hear the same three: home office, laptop, maybe the car. So that's what you claim. You lodge, you get the refund, and some quiet part of you spends the next year wondering what you left behind.

Here's the thing: the real list is longer and more ordinary than you'd expect. The law is roughly one sentence: if you spent it to earn your business income, you can generally deduct it (ITAA 1997 s 8-1). The software subscriptions. The insurance. The fee you paid to get last year's tax done. The problem was never the principle. The problem is that the detail lives across thousands of ATO pages, and nobody has an evening for that.

So you ask your agent instead

You type the question the way you'd say it out loud: what can I actually claim? No forms, no dropdown asking for your industry code. Your agent already knows the shape of your year, because you saved a profile once: sole trader, GST-registered, spare room, car.

Then it does the thing a friend can't. It walks a 59-category map built from ATO guidance and keeps everything that fits how you actually work. The occupation-specific rules for what you do. The category you didn't know had a name. The ones the ATO is watching this year, sorted to the top so you know where the receipts matter most.

And next to every single one: the source. Not "trust me". The section, the ruling, the page.

Maya's evening

Maya designs brand identities from the spare room of a Brisbane apartment. Late June, laptop open, receipts within arm's reach. She gives her agent three sentences about her year and asks the question.

It comes back with the map. Her 1,480 hours at home are worth $1,036 under the fixed rate (70 cents an hour for 2025-26, and it wants her to know an estimate of hours won't cut it: the ATO expects a record of the actual ones). The $2,399 laptop can be written off in full this year. The 2,100 km of driving to client sites comes to $1,848 at 88 cents a kilometre, no logbook needed under 5,000. The design software, the income protection premiums: on the list, with the source beside each.

Maya is made up. The rates and sections are real for 2025-26, and that's rather the point: every line arrives with the ATO page behind it, so when her accountant asks where a number came from, the answer is a link, not a shrug.

The part that actually changes things

It isn't the speed, although the speed is nice. It's that you stop acting on "probably". Probably I can claim this. Probably that rule still exists. An agent on its own is confident; an agent with ato-mcp is checkable, and for tax those are different things entirely.

None of it is tax advice, and it doesn't pretend to be. When a decision is material, you still take it to a registered tax agent. You just arrive with the citations instead of the question.