classifying food expenses for a restaurant review business

layla1986

Wonder if someone could help with the following:

We are setting up a new Ltd company which will publish restaurant reviews online. In order to create content for our reviews - we need to purchase food at various restaurants for the purpose of reviewing.

Is it possible to classify these food purchases as marketing costs or similar and benefit from tax relief? Or would HRMC automatically deem them as "entertainment" due to the nature of the expense?

Any help much appreciated.
Thank you,

Layla

Pian32

Hi Layla.
I think it might be worth asking HMRC directly about the scenario. However when I see this I feel it wouldn't be entertainment since it's part of the job and not an extra bonus for employees.

douglasstroud

Last thing I would ever do is ask HMRC for advice as more times than not they are wrong, basically call handlers looking it up!
If the expenses are legitimate business expenses then it is fine to claim them, just make sure you can back them up with the actual printed reviews and obviously it only takes one person to eat and give a review.