Hoping someone can help we are a small building company our builder have started to work away and we were planning to give them £25 per night to cove meals and drinks what is the best way to deal with this, I have applied for a BSR which replaces the dispensation, but I have never done expenses before.
Another thought was to pay in their wages but it would have to be more than the £25 then, it is making things very difficult as you know what builders can be like.
Any advise of different ways to do want to avoid having to do P11D's
Where does your £25 figure come from. If you are using the Benchmark Scale Rate you don't have to apply as such but you have to be sure that the criteria for qualifying journeys are met? We regularly have lads working away and pay £15 per night. Don't forget the breakfast and evening meal rate are only for exceptional circumstances not for those who regularly start early/finish late.
We usually give it in cash which they collect from the office before making the journey. Alternatively you can set up a non taxable payment in your payroll software (this is how we pay genuine business mileage). Occasionally we pay more than the scale rate and in that instance I have a pay element set up in Sage which takes account of the fact that tax/NI will be deducted so if we want to give them an extra £5 towards breakfast we actually pay £7.50 to cover deductions. This avoids having to do P11D's.
I have to say that our accountant got very confused over this matter when the new benchmark rates were rbought in and his interpretation varied slightly from mine (in that he thought we could pay more whereas we decided to err on the side of caution).
The final alternative (not reccomended for your average construction worker!) is to get them to save every single receipt and pay exactly what legitimate expenses they occured.
It depends on hours worked. There is a one meal rate of £5 (5 hours), a 2 meal rate of £10(10 hours) a breakfast rate (leaves home before 6am) of £5 and a late evening meal rate (gets home after 8pm) of £15. Then I think (don't quote me on this) that there is an incidental overnight expenses rate of £5.
