Quirky Campers pays VAT of 20% on the commission, service fee and on the payment processing fees that we collect from your bookings. The amount that is paid to you (the owner) has NO VAT charged on it.
Not VAT registered?
You do not need to do anything to either claim or pay VAT on the Rental Amount paid to you. At present there is no need or advantage to being VAT registered for renting through Quirky and for most (if not all) owners it would significantly reduce what you end up taking home. If you have several vans available for hire (eg 5) then this may change.
VAT registered?
Some owners are VAT registered because they have a linked business which they are not allowed to separate out the campervan hire business. If you are VAT registered you will need to pay VAT on the full amount you receive from us in each payout. You can calculate this by dividing the amount you receive by 6. For example £100/6 = £16.67 to pay to HMRC. This method is called Cash Basis, speak to your accountant to confirm this is the appropriate method for you.
Can I claim back the VAT that Quirky Campers has paid on their commission, service fee and payment fees?
No - There is no tax requirement or advantage in putting these gross figures through your books. The only way to do this would be to report the gross booking fees as your incomes, calculate VAT on the full amount, put through our cut as costs and take claim back the VAT we have paid. However the end result will be exactly the same amount of income to you and VAT to HMRC.
Why doesn't Quirky provide these figures?
In short, because it's a bit complicated and we are still developing the tools to report the details of this to owners. The payout you receive can be made up of multiple bookings and each booking is made up of Rental Amount, Add-on, Mileage, Delivery Charges and Adjustments. The percentage on the rental amount is 21% and on the rest it's 2.5% so the VAT on each as a proportion of the whole is 3.5% and 0.417% respectively. The overall VAT amount changes as a percentage of the whole. In addition the service fee is recorded separately (in wheelbase). We are tracking these figures to calculate our VAT liability each quarter but don't yet have our system set up to report all of this detail to the individual booking level. In time we hope to do this but the advice we have received is that it is not necessary even for those owners who are VAT registered so we have not made it a priority. Do let us know if your circumstances are different.