Separating Business and Pleasure
Do you have a substantial population of mobile phones provided to your staff? Do you have a home worker policy? Do your corporate usage policies allow personal use?
Many organisations are becoming aware of the challenges they face when providing staff with mobile phones. Not least because they are under increasing pressure from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) to provide records of this usage for VAT purposes.
Equally important is a flexible company usage policy to guide employees in the use of company phones. Our experience is that typical personal usage of mobile phones represents 20 – 30% of usage. For an organisation with 500 mobiles this means £45k in costs per annum!
VAT requirements
When mobile phones are issued by an organisation, they must have clear policies and practices to demonstrate that they are keeping accurate records of personal usage.
HMRC guidelines offer three options for businesses to account for VAT:
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Option 1: Clear and enforced policy on zero usage
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Option 2: One off analysis and profiling of personal usage
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Option 3: On-going apportionment of VAT
How to tackle the issues
Damovo Web Bill has the answer by providing organisations with full recording and reporting facilities on personal usage for all company phones, not just mobiles. If you use multiple carriers, it will also consolidate all charges into a single view. We host the system in a secure location, providing access for clients via a browser interface with full authorisation security.
Providing education and visibility of costs to the users are the best methods to drive down and gain control of phone usage, both mobile and fixed. By using Web Bill, users have regular access to their mobile phone charges which encourages accountability for phone usage. This in conjunction with sensible guidelines will enable organisations to reduce phone charges at the same time accurately reporting personal usage for VAT purposes.
