A job that lands on one desk in December

Somebody at a small firm gets asked to sort out the Christmas gifts, for staff, for clients, or both. There is usually no procurement department to hand it to, and no note left behind by whoever did it last year. The budget is one they set themselves, and the deadline is whatever December turns out to be.

What is here

BusinessChristmasGifts.uk works through the two questions that job actually raises: what a gift will cost once delivery and origination are added up, and which HMRC rule applies to it. It is built around firms of roughly five to fifty people, where the person doing the buying is often also the director whose own tax position is affected by the choice.

It sells nothing and takes no commission from any supplier it mentions. It is not a shop, a directory, or a place to place an order.

How the figures are put together

A tax figure carries the HMRC manual reference it came from and the tax year it belongs to, because a threshold stated without its year stops being true the next time the Budget changes it. A supplier's minimum order quantity carries the date it was read from that supplier's own page, because a minimum stated without a date is really just a guess.

Where a rule treats a director differently from other staff, such as the annual cap that sits on top of the £50 trivial benefit limit, that difference gets its own sentence.

The two calculators

• One takes headcount, budget per head and delivery details, and works out the real cost per gift once origination and per-parcel delivery are spread across the list, along with whether that figure still sits inside £50 including VAT.
• One takes the details of a specific gift, staff or client, its value, whether it carries the business name, and returns the HMRC rule that governs it, along with the manual page behind that rule.

Both work from whatever numbers are typed in. Either can return the wrong answer if those numbers are wrong, which is the reason the HMRC page behind each rule is always named separately, so it can be checked on its own.

Who this is for

The main reader is an owner-manager, office manager or PA doing this for the first time or the fifth, with no finance team to ask. A bookkeeper or accountant checking the tax position on gifts a client has already bought will find the same rules laid out the same way.

The full conditions for gifts to clients, including the worked examples around the £50 line, are set out on the client Christmas gifts deductibility page. A supplier figure that looks out of date can be reported through the contact page.