Schemes
TOMS — Tour Operators' Margin Scheme
Quarterly provisional calculations, deferrals, the year-end annual adjustment, and the full audit trail.
Who it's for
Travel businesses that buy in supplies (accommodation, transport, excursions) and re-sell them in their own name to travellers. See VAT Notice 709/5.
The workflow
- Setup — create the required nominal accounts and tax rates in your accounting platform.
- Quarterly — pull transactions, apply your provisional margin %, post the journal.
- Year-end — recalculate the actual margin, post the annual adjustment, and roll forward the new provisional %.
Beyond the basics
- Deferrals — defer transactions to a later period; on release they move to the chosen period and feed that calculation.
- Reconciliation — check the posted figures against your accounting platform before filing.
- Audit log & audit pack — every action (approve, post, include/exclude a transaction, manual entries, year-end) is logged and can be exported as a printable audit pack.
- Amendment checks — we flag source transactions that changed in your accounting system after you calculated.
Common pitfalls
- Forgetting that supplies enjoyed outside the EU/UK fall outside TOMS.
- Using last year's provisional % indefinitely instead of refreshing it at year-end.
- Including agency-only transactions in the margin pool.
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