Monthly VAT Taxi Invoices for UK Companies

## How does CabsOn produce a monthly VAT invoice for company taxi rides? We consolidate every completed ride booked under your corporate account during a calendar month into a single PDF invoice, generated automatically on the first working day of the following month. Each ride is recorded in the portal at the moment it completes with the driver's fare breakdown, applicable surcharges (waiting time, out-of-hours, airport meet-and-greet), and 20 percent VAT calculated on the taxable portion. On the 1st of the month our billing job aggregates those records, produces a numbered VAT invoice, writes a PDF to your portal storage, and dispatches an email with the PDF attached to your nominated accounting inbox. The invoice number is sequential across your account, which keeps HMRC audits and internal reconciliation straightforward. Payment terms are set at registration — typically 14 days net for card-on-file accounts and 30 days net for BACS accounts, with Direct Debit available for higher-volume accounts. Nothing about this process requires a call, a support ticket or a manual export step; the invoice is a scheduled artefact of your account, not a request you raise. ## What information does the invoice contain for HMRC compliance? The invoice includes every field HMRC requires on a full VAT invoice for supplies over £250: our company name and VAT registration number, your company name and registered address, the invoice date and unique invoice number, the tax point (the end of the billing period), a description of the supply (private hire journey), the net amount, the VAT rate applied, the VAT amount, and the gross total. Each ride then appears as a separate line with: date and time of pickup, pickup postcode or venue name, drop-off postcode or venue name, passenger name (as booked), booking reference, department or cost centre tag if configured, net fare, VAT at 20 percent, and gross fare. That level of detail satisfies most finance teams' requirement to trace every line to a specific journey and a specific traveller, and it satisfies HMRC's guidance on private hire journeys as a taxable supply. If your VAT scheme is cash accounting rather than accrual, the tax point is aligned to payment date rather than invoice date on request. ## When is the invoice issued and how do I access it? Invoices are issued on the first working day of each month, covering all completed rides in the previous calendar month. Cancellation fees, no-show charges and any manual adjustments raised during the month appear on the same invoice under a dedicated section, so no ride event ever falls outside the monthly cycle. You can access invoices three ways: (1) log into your Corporate Portal at business.cabson.uk and open the **Invoices** page, where every monthly invoice is listed with a download button for PDF and a separate download for the itemised CSV; (2) receive the PDF automatically as an email attachment on the accounting inbox you nominated at registration, with a copy CC'd to any additional finance recipients you choose; (3) pull invoices programmatically via our billing API using a key generated on the **API Keys** page in your portal, which is how finance teams building bespoke expense systems typically integrate. Historical invoices are retained for a minimum of six years to match HMRC's record-keeping requirement. ## Can I split the invoice across departments or cost centres? Yes. In the **Departments** section of the portal you can define cost centres — for example Sales, R&D, Executive, or specific project codes — and assign travellers or individual bookings to them. The monthly invoice then contains a per-department summary showing the net, VAT and gross amounts attributable to each cost centre, plus a per-department appendix listing the underlying rides. If your finance team runs a general ledger with multiple sub-ledgers, this makes it possible to code the single invoice payment across multiple accounting lines without manually re-tagging each ride at import time. Cost centres can also be enforced at the booking stage, so a traveller from the Sales department cannot accidentally book a ride against the Executive budget. For consultancies and recruitment agencies that pass ride cost through to clients, the department tag can double as a client code, which makes month-end recharge invoicing to end clients a matter of filtering the CSV rather than reworking the transaction detail. ## Does the invoice work with Xero, QuickBooks and Sage? We export both PDF and CSV formats. The CSV is structured so each ride is a separate row with columns for date, description, net, VAT, gross, and cost centre — which imports cleanly into Xero's bank feed reconciliation, QuickBooks' expense entry module, and Sage's supplier invoice import. We do not currently offer a direct API integration into those accounting packages that pushes invoices without user action; that is on our 2026 roadmap. Today's workflow is: download the CSV from the portal, run the import in your accounting software of choice, and match against the single BACS payment or card debit reference on your bank statement. Most finance teams we work with complete this in under ten minutes per month, and several have told us the ten-minute manual review is a feature rather than a friction — it forces one pair of eyes on the previous month's taxi spend before the numbers land in the P&L. ## How does CabsOn compare to Uber for Business and Addison Lee on invoicing? Honestly: Uber for Business is stronger on breadth of city coverage globally and has direct expense integrations into SAP Concur, Chrome River and Zeno for large enterprises. If your company runs one of those expense platforms and travels heavily in the US or continental Europe, Uber will likely serve you better on integration depth in 2026. Addison Lee has the strongest London executive fleet and the longest track record on high-value premium journeys inside the M25. For an all-Executive-Class account inside central London, their driver quality and vehicle standard are a hard benchmark to beat, and their PA-friendly booking portal is well-regarded by concierge teams at established hotels. Where we win: (1) we invoice at the UK VAT rate on every ride nationally with no minimum monthly spend and no separate onboarding fee; (2) our per-ride pricing sits below both on standard saloon journeys outside London; (3) our invoice is a single monthly PDF from the day you register, not gated behind a multi-week enterprise procurement cycle; (4) we operate entirely under UK law with UK-based support and GDPR-compliant data storage in London and Manchester. For a UK-focused SME, recruitment agency, hotel group or mid-market professional services firm, that combination is usually more useful than a Concur integration you will not use. ## What happens for cash rides, tips, cancellation fees and waiting time? Corporate accounts settle everything monthly on invoice, so cash rides do not apply — travellers show the app booking confirmation and the driver logs the ride against your account. Tips paid via the app appear as a separate gratuity line, marked "not subject to VAT" per HMRC guidance on voluntary payments to service providers. Waiting time is billed at the driver's stated per-minute rate after the free grace period — typically 5 minutes for standard bookings and 60 minutes for airport meet-and-greet with flight tracking — and is subject to VAT at 20 percent. Cancellation fees appear as a dedicated section on the invoice with the original booking reference and the reason code, so your finance team can allocate them accurately against the department that raised them, or dispute them within the two-working-day window if the cancellation was on our side. ## Can I approve rides above a spend threshold before they book? Yes. On the **Approvals** page in your Corporate Portal you can configure spend rules — for example, any ride quoted above £75, any airport journey, any ride outside standard business hours, or any ride booked by a specific traveller — that require line-manager sign-off before the driver is dispatched. Approvers receive an in-app notification and an email with the ride details and quoted fare, and can approve or decline with a single click. The traveller sees a "pending approval" status until the manager acts, and both the approval decision and the timestamp are recorded against the ride on the invoice. Once approved, the ride appears on your monthly invoice like any other line. Declined rides do not appear on the invoice at all. This gives finance leads a control point without introducing friction into everyday low-value bookings that do not warrant a sign-off cycle. ## What about budget caps per department or per traveller? The **Budgets** page lets you set monthly spend ceilings per department, per project code, or per named traveller. Utilisation is shown in real time — a Sales department with a £5,000 monthly cap that has spent £3,400 by the 20th is flagged amber, and again in red once the cap is reached. When the cap is reached, further bookings from that department require an approver override, which is logged on the invoice with the approver's name. Budgets and approvals combine well: an SME with a £15,000 total monthly taxi budget can allocate £5,000 to Sales, £3,000 to R&D, £2,000 to Executive, and £5,000 to a general pool, then set the £75 per-ride approval threshold only inside the Executive envelope, where the discretion actually matters. The remaining pools run frictionlessly under their own caps. ## Can I download historical invoices and see spend trends? The **Invoices** page in your portal lists every monthly invoice since account opening. You can download any of them as PDF or CSV, and the **Reports** page provides trend charts — spend by month, top travellers, top routes, average fare, and department utilisation — which is useful for budget-setting conversations at the start of each financial year. If you need a bespoke report for board or budget purposes that is not in the standard reporting library, our support team can pull it against your account data at no additional cost. ## How do we handle non-VAT-registered drivers? The supply of a private hire journey to your company is made by CabsOn, which is UK VAT-registered. We invoice you with VAT at 20 percent regardless of whether the individual driver fulfilling the journey is themselves VAT-registered under the £90,000 threshold. Your reclaim position is therefore unchanged by any single driver's VAT status. This is the same tax treatment that applies to Uber for Business rides in the UK following the 2022 tax decision on ride-hailing platforms, and it means your finance team never needs to inspect individual driver VAT numbers to substantiate a reclaim.