HMRC Home Working Expenses

fas

HMRC offers cash basis accounts a nominal £26/month home working allowance (as an easy way to expense a portion of utility bills to self-employed working at home). This means I get £4.20/month offset against tax. What's a good way to represent these?

What I've done is add an business expense account for this and put expenses of £26 each month. That allows me to include it in the sum of business expenses at tax year end.

But that has to have a bank/cash account where that money was spent from, so I then had to create a nominal bank account for this, as it isn't real money that came through a bank account.

Finally that £26 didn't get paid to anyone, so I need to balance it against something else. The obvious seemed to be to put an equal credit against the utility bills, so in effect I've put some of the utility bills into a separate heading for home working expenses.

However, this is very clumsy, having to have a separate imaginary bank account to pass the money through (in GNUCash which I used to use, I could just balance one off against the other without an intermediate account). And it also means the final total of utility bills is artificially low - I'd have to remember to add on the £26x12 to get a proper picture of total home utility expenses.

Is there a better, less clumsy way to do this, in which everything still balances?