A job that lands on one desk

Sorting out Christmas gifts for staff and clients is usually somebody's job for a few weeks a year. At a firm of five to fifty people there is rarely a procurement department to hand it to, so it falls to whoever set the budget, or whoever picked it up last year and left no notes behind. This site is for that person: an owner-manager, an office manager or a PA who needs to know what a gift will actually cost once delivery is added, and whether HMRC will tax it.

The same questions come up whether the list is for staff or for clients, and the two are governed by different rules. Client Christmas gifts have their own conditions for staying deductible, and a reader dealing with both needs to keep the two apart.

Where the figures come from

A tax threshold is stated with the HMRC manual page it comes from and the tax year it belongs to, because a bare figure goes stale the moment the rules move. A supplier's minimum order quantity is stated as published on the date it was read from that supplier's own page.

Lead times work the same way. Rather than describing what December ordering usually looks like, the lead times quoted for branded and pre-made gifts are attributed to the supplier's own page and the date they were read, because a forecast this site cannot update is not something worth relying on.

What it covers

• Whether a planned staff gift stays inside the trivial benefit exemption, and what happens if it does not
• Whether a planned client gift is deductible, and how the VAT rule sits alongside the corporation tax rule
• What named suppliers state as their minimum order for a list of this size
• What a gift actually costs per head once delivery and origination are spread across the list
• Which HMRC rule governs a specific gift, and which manual page to check it against

It sells nothing, stocks nothing and takes no commission on anything a reader goes on to buy. Where a figure has moved on since it was read, the contact page takes details of what changed so it can be checked.