Corporate taxi cost centres and departmental budgets

## How do cost centres work in a CabsOn business account? A cost centre in CabsOn is a labelled budget pool tied to a group of travellers. In practice, most businesses map cost centres to their existing accounting structure — usually one per department (Marketing, Legal, Operations), one per office (London, Manchester, Bristol) or one per client project for agencies and consultancies. Whichever mapping suits your ledger, the mechanics are the same. An admin opens the Departments page in business.cabson.uk, adds a new cost centre with a name and a short code, sets a monthly cap in pounds, and assigns users. From that point, every ride those users book is automatically stamped with the cost code and counted against the cap. The design goal is that a traveller never has to think about it. They open the customer app, book a ride to Manchester Piccadilly, complete the journey, and their department's budget updates in real time in the admin dashboard. There is no post-trip coding exercise, no expense claim, no receipt to lose. ## Can I set spending limits per department? Yes. Each cost centre has its own monthly cap. A ten-person marketing team might have a 2,000 pound budget while a two-person legal team has 500 pounds. Caps reset on the first of each calendar month at midnight UK time, and the running utilisation is visible to admins on the Budgets page as both an absolute figure in pounds and a percentage of the cap. You also choose what happens when a cap is hit. The two options are a hard block, where new bookings on that cost centre are refused until the next month or until the cap is raised, and an approval flow, where over-budget rides are routed to a nominated approver for one-click authorisation. We recommend the approval flow for departments where operational urgency matters (a legal team needing to get a partner to a late-night client meeting) and the hard block for departments where budget discipline matters more than convenience (a marketing team where every over-run undermines the following quarter's plan). ## How does cost centre coding appear on the monthly invoice? We issue one PDF invoice per business account on the first working day of each month, covering every ride in the previous calendar month. The invoice is grouped by cost centre, with a subtotal for each department, VAT itemised per ride at the standard UK rate of 20 percent, and a grand total. Alongside the PDF we send a CSV export with one row per ride, columns for cost centre code, department name, traveller name, date, time, pickup postcode, destination postcode, net fare, VAT amount and gross total. That CSV is engineered to import directly into Xero, QuickBooks Online and Sage 50 with cost-centre-level coding preserved. For finance teams running a bespoke ledger, the same data is available through our authenticated business API using an API key generated on the API Keys page in the portal. We publish OpenAPI documentation for the invoicing endpoints so your systems team can build the integration in a day. ## What about VAT and HMRC compliance? Every CabsOn invoice is a VAT-compliant document under UK HMRC rules. It shows our VAT registration number, the invoice date, the sequential invoice number, our registered business address, your business's name and address, the net taxable amount, the VAT charged at 20 percent, and the gross total. Rides are dated on the day the journey took place, not the day the invoice is issued, which keeps your VAT return periods clean when a journey happens on the 31st and the invoice is raised on the 1st. If your finance team needs a VAT-receipt-compliant document for a specific ride mid-month — for a client expense pass-through, for example — an individual VAT receipt for any completed ride can be downloaded from the Bookings page at any time. ## How does this compare with Uber for Business or Addison Lee Corporate? To be fair to both, they do this well. Uber for Business supports departmental profiles and per-user spend limits, and its scale means it works in almost every UK city. Addison Lee's corporate account is a strong choice for London-only businesses who want executive-class vehicles and a dedicated account manager, and its cost centre reporting is mature. Where we differ is granularity and price. CabsOn's cost centre caps are enforced at the point of booking with configurable warning thresholds, not just reported on afterwards. Our invoice line-item detail (pickup postcode, destination postcode, ride duration) is available in the standard CSV export without needing to raise a request through an account manager. And we do not charge a per-seat platform fee — cost centres, budgets, SSO and monthly invoicing are all included on the standard business tariff. If you are a smaller UK business where a per-seat fee changes the maths, that matters. If you are a large enterprise where a dedicated account manager matters more, Uber and Addison Lee are honest alternatives worth evaluating. ## What does the corporate reporting include? The Reports page in business.cabson.uk lets you filter and export ride data along five axes: cost centre, traveller, date range, office and vehicle class. Standard reports include monthly spend by cost centre, top ten travellers per department, utilisation percentage of budget by department, most common pickup and destination pairs, and month-on-month comparison against the same period last year. Every report can be exported as PDF for board packs or CSV for onward analysis in Excel or your BI tool. The CSV is UTF-8 encoded with proper quoting for postcodes and address strings, which prevents the classic Excel-mangles-postcode problem where SW1A 2AA becomes a date. ## How does cost centre allocation work for one-off cases? A user has a default cost centre, but any single ride can be re-coded at the point of booking. This is important for agencies and consultancies where a single team member works across multiple client projects. When booking a ride, the traveller (or the PA booking on their behalf) can pick from a dropdown of every cost centre their account has access to, and that override is honoured for that ride only. The default cost centre remains for future bookings unless they change it. For businesses that want tighter control, you can restrict which cost centres each user can see in that dropdown, so a marketing team member cannot accidentally code a personal ride to the legal budget. ## Can I roll cost centres out to a multi-office business? Yes, and this is where SSO group mapping pays for itself. If your organisation uses Google Workspace or Microsoft Entra ID, we can map SSO groups directly to CabsOn cost centres via SAML. Once configured, a new starter added to the "London Office" group in Entra ID inherits the London Office cost centre, its budget and its approval rules on first login to business.cabson.uk. No admin ticket, no manual assignment, no orphaned users. For businesses without SSO, admins can bulk-invite users via CSV upload with the cost centre code in a column, and the invitation email includes a one-click join link. Typical rollout for a fifty-person business takes an afternoon. ## What real-world use cases do our customers run? Three examples from live CabsOn corporate accounts. A Manchester-based recruitment agency uses one cost centre per client engagement, so rides for candidate interviews are billed against the client's engagement budget and appear on the client's monthly re-invoice with the correct cost code, no manual re-keying. A London hotel group uses three cost centres — Guest, Staff and Event — so front-of-house can book rides for stranded guests without those costs polluting the staff commuting budget. A national law firm uses one cost centre per practice group (Corporate, Litigation, Real Estate) with soft-warning thresholds at 80 percent utilisation so practice heads see the warning before month-end and can rebalance if needed. Each of these organisations moved to CabsOn from either credit-card-with-monthly-reconciliation (painful) or a bigger platform's corporate product (expensive per seat). The reason cost centres matter is that they collapse the reconciliation step from days to minutes.