Ruddicks Chartered Accountants partner Lyndal Kimpton said it was important not to just automatically fill out the same deductions that you do every year - the Australian Tax Office isn't going to believe you if you claim travel expenses from March onwards.

"The ATO actually just put out some correspondence in relation to some areas that they're going to be targeting," she said.

"Things like laundry - if you're not wearing a uniform you can't claim to have it laundered - so people have got to be really careful to not just claim what they claimed last year.

"They need to give some considered thought to it, and to be able to show why they've claimed what they've claimed."

She said Ruddicks had been fielding questions from people seeking to do the right things with filing their tax returns during a highly unusual financial year.

"I think there is some confusion, but the ATO is doing what they can to make deductions to do with working from home a lot easier," she said.

People who have been working from home have two options.

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They can calculate all of their expenses to do with working from home, like electricity, internet, home office supplies, phone costs, and so on.

"But you need to calculate what portion of those expenses were used while you were working from home," Ms Kimpton said.

"So that has a lot of proving, and can be quite time consuming to come up with those calculations."

She said you have to come up with a realistic estimate of what portion of the services you are claiming were legitimately used for work purposes.

"So, as an example, with your internet, obviously people are still watching Netflix and those types of things, so it has to be a reasonable estimation of what portion was used for business," she said.

The second option is to claim a base rate of 80 cents per hour for every hour that you have been working from home - something the ATO has introduced for the COVID-19 period from March 1 to June 30.

"You do need to prove that you've been working from home, but say the average day is 7.5 hours, you can claim 80 cents for each of those hours.

"If you do a 38 hour week working from home, basically you can claim about $30 a week.

"It's a lot simpler [to just claim 80 cents for each hour], but it is quite low, so if you have time to do the full calculations you'll potentially have a higher claim than you would otherwise."

She said one quirk to watch out for was claiming rates if you have been working from home.

"That can turn your home into being classified as business use, which can take away the main residence exemption for capital gains when you sell it," she said. "Well, it wouldn't be 100 per cent exempt, so you have to be careful with that."

"If someone wasn't sure about claiming that sorts of things, I would be seeking advice from an accountant."