Leisure Hospitality & Travel
Our Leisure, Hospitality and Travel group act for bars, restaurants, pubs and travel businesses of all sizes, from start-ups to substantial private and public companies. We provide the whole range of accounting services including: business advice, audit, tax and corporate finance.
We have developed a deep understanding of the complexities, pitfalls and issues businesses in the industry face, which enables us to offer practical, realistic advice and share areas of best practice to help our leisure, hospitality and travel clients succeed.
Regular contributors to Caterer & Hotelkeeper magazine, and business partners to the Institute of Hospitality, we offer practical, commercial advice, taking into account the legislative and statutory position as well as the operational and practical issues.
We are often a sounding board for our clients, not just on accounting issues, but general commercial and legal areas too. If you are opening your first site, or need assistance in how to take the next step in operations and strategy to branch out with multiple sites, or even how to go about developing an exit strategy, we can help.
There are a variety of government backed schemes that may be relevant to your business some are tax based eg EIS and SIES and others involve discounted loans . Dependent on the amount involved, you may also be of interest to a venture capitalist or a business angel investor. Contact your accountant or a specialist corporate finance team like Devonshire Corporate Finance to find out what is the best source of finance for your business.
Of course you could increase their pay and benefits package but people are often motivated by the prospect of owning an equity interest in the business and you may not have spare cash at the moment to pay them more . A well designed incentive arrangement such as one using the government’s EMI scheme is both tax efficient and can be used to incentivise your team.
TOMS stands for the Tour Operator’s Margin Scheme and is a VAT scheme aimed at simplifying the rules for suppliers of designated travel services. The scheme doesn’t just apply to tour operators, but often applies to travel agents, events organisers and other businesses selling travel. Very simply TOMS imposes a VAT charge on the gross margin made by the operator rather than the usual 20% applied to gross sales, and VAT on the costs of travel supplied therefore, can’t be recovered.
From 1 October 2012 the VAT zero-rate will not apply to hot take-away food which is above the ambient temperature at the time it is provided to the customer; with the exception of freshly baked bread for consumption off premises. Instead the VAT standard-rate will apply.
The tax rules surrounding tips can be complex, but very simply if a customer leaves a cash tip directly to staff without any involvement from the employer, then neither PAYE nor NIC applies. If however, tips are collected by the employers (either by cash or by card) and then paid on to staff the PAYE and NIC position must be considered carefully. PAYE must be operated on all tips, but the NIC rules are less straightforward. Advice should be sought here but generally, if the company is involved in how the tips are distributed to employees, then NIC is likely to apply.