The job this is built around

Somewhere in a small firm, in the run-up to Christmas, someone gets told to sort out the gifts. There is rarely a handover from whoever did it last year, and rarely a procurement department to ask instead. The person doing it usually knows what VAT is and roughly how corporation tax works, but has never had a reason to open HMRC's Employment Income Manual, or work out why a director's gift might be capped differently from an employee's.

This is written for that person: an owner-manager, office manager or PA at a firm of roughly five to fifty people, working to a budget they set themselves, usually against a deadline that isn't far off. A bookkeeper or accountant checking the tax position on gifts a client has already bought will find the same material useful, since the question is the same one asked after the fact.

What sits alongside the guidance

• A comparison table of named suppliers' own stated minimum order quantities, quoted from their pages and dated.
• A calculator that works out the real cost per gift once origination and per-parcel delivery are spread across a headcount, and whether each gift stays inside £50 including VAT.
• A tool that takes the value of a gift, who it's for and what it is, and names the HMRC rule that governs it.

Each of these works from the figures the reader puts in. Neither holds prices of its own, and either can return the wrong answer if the figures going in are wrong or a rule has moved on since it was last checked against HMRC.

Where the figures come from

A tax figure is stated with the tax year it belongs to and the date it was read from HMRC's own manual. A supplier figure is stated as published on the date it was read from that supplier's own page, never as a current price. Where a figure has changed since it was quoted, that's worth reporting.

Nothing on the site is for sale. It takes no commission on any gift or supplier named in it, and a supplier appearing in the comparison table is a sourcing decision, not a recommendation.