Fix: Self-Employment Categories Now Available When Adding Transactions Manually
Fix: Self-Employment Categories Now Available When Adding Transactions Manually
Release: v1.0.430
Affected route: /dashboard/transactions
Affected taxpayer types: Self-Employed, Both (self-employed + property)
What was happening
When adding a transaction manually via Transactions → Add Transaction, the HMRC Category dropdown only ever showed property-income categories:
- Rental Income
- Premium Income
- Reverse Premium
- Other Property Income
- Rent, Rates & Insurance
- Property Repairs
- Finance Costs
- (and other property expense categories…)
This was incorrect for users whose taxpayer type is set to Self-Employed or Both. Those users had no way to assign a correct SE HMRC category at the point of entry and were forced into a two-step workaround:
- Select Uncategorised in the Add Transaction form.
- Find the transaction in the ledger and re-categorise it using the inline selector.
The inline ledger selector was already working correctly — it referenced SE_INCOME_CATEGORIES and SE_EXPENSE_CATEGORIES from the shared hmrc-category-labels module. The Add Transaction form did not.
What was fixed
The ManualTransactionForm component now respects taxpayerType when building the category dropdown:
| Taxpayer Type | Income categories shown | Expense categories shown |
|---|---|---|
property | Property income categories only | Property expense categories only |
self_employed | SE income categories only | SE expense categories only |
both | Property and SE income categories | Property and SE expense categories |
SE categories that now appear include (but are not limited to):
Income
- Turnover (
se_turnover) - Other Income (
se_other_income)
Expenses
- Cost of Goods (
se_cost_of_goods) - Wages & Salaries (
se_wages) - Travel & Subsistence (
se_travel) - Office & Admin (
se_office) - Professional Fees (
se_professional_fees) - (and all other SE expense categories defined in
hmrc-category-labels)
Why this matters for MTD compliance
HMRC's Making Tax Digital for Income Tax requires that every transaction is mapped to the correct HMRC category before a quarterly submission is made. Mismatched or missing categories are flagged as errors during submission. The previous behaviour meant SE users either submitted with an Uncategorised placeholder (causing validation failures) or had to remember to manually fix every transaction they added through the form.
No action required
This is a front-end fix. No data migration is needed. Existing transactions that were saved as Uncategorised due to this issue will still need to be re-categorised manually before your next quarterly submission — use the inline category selector in the ledger view to update them.
To check for uncategorised transactions:
- Go to Transactions.
- Filter by Category → Uncategorised.
- Use the inline category selector on each row to assign the correct HMRC category.