The treatment of VAT is applied to the event as a whole
In general, we apply the following tax treatments based on the event types selected on the Event Code creation form.
- Club membership: Sports club are VAT exempt. All other clubs must pay VAT on membership fees
- Sponsorship: Please refer to article on VAT for sponsorship
- Kit Sales: VAT payable
- Trek: VAT not payable. Clubs are not providing any service, they are effectively pooling funds to organize a group holiday. For this assumption to holds treks must be breakeven (Profit = 0, no exceptions)
- Sports: No VAT payable on sports events
- Social: Any ticketed event where’s the goods or services (ie. The ticket) is purchased in advance. The organizers effectively are taking risk to sell enough tickets, if not they may face losses. Clubs must pay VAT on social events.
- Social-pooled: Event costs are covered by those participating. There is no risk of losing money as fewer people either means less consumption or each person paying more. These events are VAT exempt.
- Conference/ Speaker events: These are similar to social events but are primarily educational in purpose and are VAT exempt. (Note: whilst the networking happy hour at an end of a conference may fall under this category, a happy hour alone with some speaker, or a roundtable dinner would not)
In some cases, the LBS Finance team may reach out to you directly to get more information about the event, in order to classify it appropriately.
For compliance purposes, the final decision on the tax treatment of your event rests with the LBS Finance team. Their decision is final and can be found in the Event Code Sheet.
Looking under the VAT Status column:
- “S”: VAT will be paid on event revenues
- “O”: VAT will not be paid on event revenues
Similarly you will see that VAT payable events will have a cost center starting with “S” whilst others will have one starting with “X”