Senior Accounting Officer accountability – Can you account for all your business travel VAT liabilities?

As part of the Finance Act 2009, large enterprises (incorporated companies with a turnover of more than £200m, or a balance sheet of more than £2bn) have needed to have a Senior Accounting Officer (SAO) in place. The responsibility of an SAO is to ensure that appropriate financial accounting arrangements are in place and that these systems are providing accurate and correct information to HMRC.

This includes VAT liabilities.

If you are a large business that needs to comply, or will need to in the future, you may want to ensure that there is an appropriate and fit-for-purpose system in place that provides data on VAT liabilities for travel and entertainment expenses accrued both at home and abroad. Using an automated expense management system, such as Concur, will significantly improve your ability to show HMRC that you have the right processes, controls and reporting for gathering and managing expense data in a systematic way so as to report on VAT liabilities.

With Concur you gain:

Control over the accuracy of the data held by the system

As an integrated end-to-end solution, much of the information held by Concur does not need to be manually entered into the system: using Concur virtually eliminates the possibility that errors are present. Data can be automatically fed from suppliers and corporate credit card suppliers, ensuring that mistakes and misallocations are avoided.

In addition, expenses can be correctly coded to their expense type to identify whether VAT reclaim is possible.

Visibility and control of T&E VAT liabilities

As it is easy to access all the data that is held on the system, you can have a complete view of employee business travel and expenses in one consolidated database, providing you with a global view of organisational spend along with any potential VAT reclaim.

The ability to quickly & easily report on VAT from domestic and international travel

Concur's data analysis tool quickly and easily identifies possible VAT refund opportunities and ensures that users enter the correct information while travelling in the UK and abroad.

Greater management of ongoing VAT claims with access to online tracking that predicts and manages financial accruals, budgets and cash flow, gives you full visibility and control of VAT accrued from business travel.

The ability to audit quickly and simply

As Concur can match receipts to expenses, and receipts that are incomplete from a VAT perspective are automatically identified. Using Concur’s Expense Report Auditing service ensures that there is an appropriate audit trail in place.