Please find attached a selection of common Expenses FAQs
Below you can find an overview of how the UK expenses system works, your responsibilities and deadlines.
There are two main criteria in the UK for claiming expenses:
1. Nature of the expenses
The expense claimed must be “wholly and exclusively for the purposes of the business”
It must also be incurred ‘necessarily’ in the performance of the duties of the employment.
For example: normal living costs such as rent, broadband, landline phone charges are not allowable because they would be incurred as a result of day to day living expenses whether you are working or not. However, accommodation while out of base overnight is allowable because it is an additional expense arising wholly from your employment and necessary to perform those duties.
2. Employment and home base expenses
In the UK, you cannot claim expenses that you could not claim if you were an employee. For example, commuting to and from your home base, meals while working from your home base, parking at your home base are not allowable.
If the reason to be at the home base is outside of your normal paid work duties, for example for a business meeting, temporary workplace or training day outside of your normal flying roster, then these expenses may be allowable.
Your contract work has employment status in the UK, despite recognition in Ireland of self-employment. For this reason, no expenses may be claimed in the UK under self-employment guidelines.
Date of commencement: Expenses should only be claimed from the date you signed the contract with your agency.
Expenses should be submitted in date order where possible.
Payrolling of expenses: In the UK, expenses may only be payrolled on an arising basis and cannot be rolled over across payroll years. Expenses must only be claimed as actuals with the exception of mileage, UK subsistence and overseas subsistence and accommodation. Unlike the Irish payroll, you must have spent on these categories so cannot claim for subsistence if you have not purchased any meals for a date claimed.
Timeline:
5th of each calendar month: Deadline for uploading expenses
6-7th Calendar month Expenses are downloaded, checked and non-allowable expenses removed.
8th Calendar month Expenses authorised for payroll
Deadline – Expenses should be submitted before the 5th day of the month following the month the expenses were incurred. So for example, January’s expenses should be submitted by 5th February. This is very
important once you start to receive a salary. If you miss the deadline, they will be carried over into the following month, so will not be lost.
Receipts – these should be uploaded electronically. It is a secure cloud server, fully backed up nightly. You should retain receipts for all uploaded expenses. It is your responsibility to retain receipts and provide them to HMRC if audited.
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OAM – Online Account Management system – this should be used to upload your expenses on a monthly basis. You will be given a user name and password shortly after signing up.