Tunde runs a printing business in Ibadan. Every month he spends real money running his business — generator diesel, design software subscriptions, delivery costs, ink cartridges. Some months that adds up to over ₦200,000.
He knows he spent the money. But when his accountant asks for records at the end of the year, Tunde cannot find most of them. Some receipts are on his phone. Some are in a drawer. Some are just gone.
So his accountant cannot use most of those expenses to reduce his tax bill. Tunde ends up paying more tax than he should.
This is one of the most common and most avoidable problems for Nigerian MSME owners. This guide shows you how to fix it.
In Nigeria, businesses pay tax on their profit — not on their total income. Revenue is all the money coming into the business. Profit is what is left after you subtract your legitimate business expenses from that total.
Here is a simple example:
The difference is ₦52,000 — just because of receipts he could not find.
The Nigeria Revenue Service (NRS) can only reduce your tax based on expenses you can prove. No receipt, no reduction. Tracking expenses is not paperwork — it is protecting your money.
Not everything you spend will reduce your tax bill. Here is a clear list of what counts — and what does not.
Expenses that reduce your tax:
Expenses that do not count:
If you are not sure whether something qualifies, ask your accountant. When in doubt, keep the receipt — it is easier to decide later than to recover a lost one.
Lucrive's Receipts section gives you a digital record of every expense. Here is how to use it.
In your Lucrive dashboard, click Receipts in the left menu. This is where all your business expenses live.
Click + Add Receipt. Fill in:
If the expense is directly tied to a job you billed a client for, you can link the receipt to that invoice. This lets you see at a glance whether a specific job was actually profitable — or whether you quoted too low.
For example: Tunde has an invoice for ₦180,000 to a client. He links the ink, paper, and delivery costs for that job — totalling ₦95,000. His actual profit on that job was ₦85,000, not ₦180,000 — that is 47 kobo kept for every naira billed. Now he knows whether he should charge more for similar jobs in future.
At any time, you can export your receipts as a PDF or spreadsheet. At tax time, hand this to your accountant instead of a bag of crumpled paper.
The single most important habit is this: photograph the receipt the moment you receive it.
Do not wait until you get home. Do not put it in your pocket to deal with later. In five seconds — right there in the shop, at the fuel station, or after a delivery — take a photo and upload it.
Most lost receipts are lost because of a two-hour delay. The phone moves to the other pocket. The paper goes into a bag. Life happens.
Five seconds now saves your accountant hours later — and saves you thousands in tax.
Set a reminder on your phone for the last day of every month. Spend 15 minutes doing this:
① Open Receipts in Lucrive
② Check that every expense from the month is recorded
③ Make sure every receipt has a photo attached
④ Check that the categories are correct
⑤ Export a PDF — save it in a folder labelled with the month and year
That 15 minutes is all you need. At the end of the year, you will have 12 clean monthly exports that your accountant can work through in an hour.
Tunde now photographs every receipt immediately. He also connected his business bank account notifications to a simple habit: when a debit hits his phone, he opens Lucrive and adds the expense while the details are fresh.
Last year his accountant was able to verify ₦380,000 in expenses that reduced his tax — compared to ₦60,000 the year before. His tax bill dropped by over ₦60,000.
The money did not appear from nowhere. It was always there. He just needed a system to capture it.
Start tracking your expenses today. Sign in to Lucrive at lucrive.io and open the Receipts section. It takes two minutes to add your first expense — and every one you add is a reduction you will not lose.
Sources & further reading
People and businesses in our examples are illustrative, not real Lucrive customers. Figures are worked examples: confirm your own position with a qualified tax adviser.