A travel expense report is an organized way for businesses and employees to track and report their expenses when they go on business-related trips. The report itself can either be printed out on paper or be digital in the form of a spreadsheet. Employees are also requested to attach any receipts to the form for tax purposes. It is especially important to track any expenses that are tax deductible. In order to stay on top of reimbursable expenses, employees are often given a deadline by which they need to file an expense report and turn in applicable receipts.
When your duties require you to be away from the area of your tax home for longer than an ordinary day’s work and you need to sleep or rest in order to do your work, this counts as traveling away from home. Your tax home is usually the entire city or area where your main place of work is situated, regardless of where your home is. For example, you live in New York, but work in Philadelphia where you stay in a hotel and eat meals there the whole week, returning to New York every weekend. Since Philadelphia is your tax home, you cannot deduct any travel, meal, or accommodation expenses there. Traveling back home at the weekend isn’t for work and so these expenses also aren’t deductible.