When starting the VAT recovery project for travel expenses, an important aspect to take into account is to define the traceability of the expenses so that once the invoice is obtained for each ticket from which VAT is to be recovered, we know for sure where the expense came from, which employee made it and to which liquidation it corresponds.
Why is traceability important in the VAT recovery process?
Being able to track this information will not only help us to have greater control when it comes to accounting for invoices, for example, if we take into account that a single invoice can redeem more than 100 tickets from different employees and different years, by leaving traceability well defined, we can know exactly all the information relating to each of the receipts, knowing at the same time how much VAT we are recovering and from which year, which makes us more aware of the profitability of the project.
Another advantage, possibly the most important one, is to leave the origin of each expense from which VAT is to be deducted well defined at the time of an internal audit or a requirement from the AEAT, since most requests of this type are usually to request a justification for that expense.
For example, let us suppose that we are asked for two things: to attach information about all the invoices for 2017 from supplier X and to justify that they relate to company expenses. For the first part, it is simple to collect all the invoices you ask for, but for the second part, which is perhaps the most important, how do we justify the expense? This is where traceability comes in. If it has been well defined from the beginning, we will know in detail the origin of each receipt that redeems each of the invoices requested from us and indicate which specific employee made that expense and that he was working on a construction site in 2017 when he had to move there for a week.
How can this traceability be achieved?
In the case of expense management applications, information is collected as soon as the employee takes a photo of the expense receipt. But in the case of physical documentation and according to the 60dias process, there are two ways.
On the one hand, there are companies that have information files where they record all this data: dates of liquidations or numbers, employees of each liquidation, typology of the expense, amounts of these expenses etc. These files are provided to the VAT recovery company in order to be able to cross-check the data and maintain all this information that can later be sent to the client in a file for uploading.
On the other hand, companies often do not have this type of file, so we only have the documentation on paper, in this case the traceability is done manually by 60dias always taking as relevant data, the employee who made the expenditure and the date or number of settlement, although each company may have some data to greater as for example the project to which it belongs or the work, etc..
It is essential and recommended that the documentation is always well organized and that each liquidation contains the correct data of the attached tickets, because having the whole process detailed and correctly defined from the origin will mean, not only saving time and costs, but also the easy solution of requests or requirements whether they are mandatory or not.
