Enterprise Rent-A-Car is helping businesses to manage car club and rental vehicle Benefit-in-Kind compliance with a new solution.

The new functionality allows businesses and drivers to meet the detailed BiK tax requirements arising from the use of daily rental and employee car clubs

While many private and public organisations are turning to rental and car clubs to reduce their dependence on grey fleet usage, employee car clubs can have BiK implications if employees use the vehicles for private mileage. Businesses must therefore keep an accurate record of mileage, origin and destination of each trip taken in a dedicated car club vehicle, ensuring no private use.

To automate this as part of the booking process, Enterprise has introduced a new feature to its Enterprise Travel Direct (ETD) booking platform, which allows businesses and drivers to meet the detailed BiK tax requirements arising from the use of daily rental and employee car clubs – ensuring they are compliant with HMRC rules.

ETD is said to be the first rental booking platform to provide this level of information, which sees employees booking a vehicle on ETD confirm that it will only be used for business miles. Organisations can use the management information provided through ETD to investigate exceptions, and to create reports in case of an HMRC audit.

ETD also embeds each organisation’s travel policy into the booking function, allowing businesses to evidence that this is enforced through every journey. The platform automatically tracks the origin, destination and mileage for every trip, whether in a dedicated car club, a rental car or in the employee’s own vehicle.

Enterprise says ETD is the only journey assessment and booking system that enables customers to compare the cost of daily rental, hourly car club, pool car and grey fleet travel based on a planned journey and real-time vehicle availability. Employees can compare the actual cost of a specific journey at a specific time, depending on whether they use a private car, a car club or daily rental.

Ryan Bushell, head of public sector sales at Enterprise, commented: “Business travel is an even greater consideration as organisations start to bring employees back to the office after lockdown. It is essential to ensure it is managed efficiently and with full adherence to the tax rules. In addition, most organisations now need to enforce a travel policy to ensure employees use the most cost-effective and sustainable means of business travel.

“ETD delivers compliance and manages demand, all while providing a valuable service where employees can quickly self-serve when they need to book travel, knowing they are using the best option for their trip.”