Lights on, lights off – your power, gas, phone, and more can count as expenses! If you work out of a building that is not your house, you’re in luck – add up your yearly utilities expenses and chalk them in.

If you work out of your home, two things get tricky: a) do not write your utilities here, but instead on Line 30 and b) you can only count business portions of telephone bills.

Start-up miner? Burn through some natural resources to get to the gold (quite literally)? This is for you. In the rare case that this applies, you should already know about it, but you can deduct some natural resource depletion if used to get to the product.

Of course there’s a worksheet! You can do two things here, depending on how you keep your books and deal with your office car. This includes personal vehicles used for work and a company car:

• Actual cost: add up all of the expenses incurred and deduct them

• Standard mileage: the IRS has already established tables for how much you can deduct if you track car use by mileage (it accounts for wear, tear, and fees). Check out that form from before.

Are you running a cottage industry out of your house? That is totally legal, but factors in a different set of costs (does your power usage count?!). There is another for for this, Form 8829, which will allow you to figure this out. Fill this out now.

Note that this accounts for everything except your cost of goods. That happened back in Line 4 and later on Line 42. Confusing? Yep.

Now we’re getting somewhere! The Schedule C version of the AGI! And a rare case of addition on a tax form.

Take your gross profit, Line 5, and add to it your other income, Line 6. Boom.

As is usual for the IRS, there are a ton of income sources that simply get dumped into “other.” As is also typical, it is your job to remember which these are. Here are the key ones, but these should be evident in your books.

• State gasoline or fuel tax refunds
• Bad debts that you recovered
• Interest
• Credits for federal tax paid on gas and fuel
• Prizes and awards

Again, some simple subtraction (your good bookkeeping up until now made you an expert in this!):

Take your gross receipts minus returns, Line 3, and subtract from it your cost of goods, Line 4.

This is not your business expenses. Again:

This is not business expenses!

Instead, this focuses on the actual cost of the products you sold. Why does this matter? It standardizes how businesses record their profit, which can alter their tax basis. Instead of alternative methods, which can bolster apparent profit or otherwise skew numbers, this creates an easily understood reading of gross profit. You can pull this number from Line 42.