How you can manage and streamline Construction business expenses

The construction industry is a wide and integral one, and whether you work in buildings, infrastructure or industrial, you need to manage your expenses.

You might be surprised at what expenses you can claim back as a builder, whether you’re paid through PAYE or work under the Construction Industry Scheme (CIS). However, depending on how you’re employed will change what you can claim back.

What can I claim?

Equipment

If you work on PAYE, you can claim costs for any tools or equipment that you paid for if your employer did not have the same or comparable item. As a CIS employee, you can deduct the cost of purchasing or replacing tools as an expense.

As a CIS or PAYE employee, you may be entitled to get reimbursed for wearing a uniform or protective equipment.

Travel

As a CIS employee, you are entitled to reimbursement for travel and subsistence expenses incurred while working at a temporary job. If your contract is less than 24 months, it is deemed transitory. If the term of your contract is unknown, the workplace will be deemed temporary until you have worked there for 24 months, at which point it will be considered permanent.

As a PAYE employee with a single permanent place of employment, you are unable to claim travel and subsistence costs. If you are compelled to work someplace else temporarily (for example, at another construction site), you will be eligible to claim transport and subsistence expenditures at that period.

Mileage can be claimed as an expense if it is incurred when travelling to a temporary work location. This implies that as a CIS employee, you may claim costs for the miles you’ve travelled for your contracts. You can only claim mileage charges as a PAYE employee while travelling to a temporary job site.

Capital

Unfortunately, as a PAYE builder, you are unable to claim capital costs, but if you operate as a builder under CIS, you can claim capital costs as long as they are acquired for business purposes. For example, if you buy something like a laptop or car just for job related matters, you can claim the capital costs back.

Vehicle costs

Like before, if you use a vehicle exclusively for business use, you can claim back the tax on mileage, road tax and insurance.

How we can help

Now you now a little more on what can be claimed back, how can you speed up this confusing and often time-consuming process of claiming back this money?

You need an automated expense management system for you and your employees. Be it a small business or enterprise, any company can benefit from using an expense management app to manage their finances in this area.

Corporate cards

Given employees credit cards to use for their expenses? Sick of having to chase up receipts? Expense Once uses open banking to automatically store a log of all expenses made by the employee, and allows them to easily take a picture of their receipt which is automatically scanned and the data checked against the credit card statement. Your employees should be focused on their important work, not on keeping track of receipts and expenses.

Get an accurate overview of your outgoings

Not only will your reports be more accurate and detailed, but you can assign tags to a project and see how much money is being spent on it at a glance. How much will the equipment set you back? What department is delaying your month-end reporting? Which costs are associated with which customer? And, perhaps most crucially, you can recognise money-saving options.

Approve remotely and easily

As all data is centralised, you can approve or deny expense reports on your phone or on desktop at any time of the day, no matter where you are. This improves the time frame in which expenses can be approved, and so improves cash flow.

Intuitive and easy to use software

Not wanting anything overly complicated? Expense Once excels in its ease of use and powerful features, as Tom Garner reviewed: “It was highly configurable and yet easy to understand, I’ve never seen any other system achieve this level of features with such ease of use.” So you can use a powerful effective tool without confusion or headaches. We also help you move onto the software to make the process as seamless and thorough as possible, so you don’t have to worry about missing data or misalignment from before moving to the system.

Got a specific requirement?

We pride ourself on our customer service so we work tirelessly to implement new features all the time, based on our unique customers needs. We know one size does not fit all, so we offer a large range of features which you can pick and choose as you need. And if you need something else, we are happy to look into how we can implement it.

So what are you waiting for? Contact us today to have a chat and see what we can do for your construction business