Recording meal allowances for employees of Austrian companies is now possible. Activation is handled by your contact person at Lanes & Planes. The feature is activated together with mileage allowance feature for employees of Austrian companies.
The daily allowance (Taggeld) is calculated automatically using the statutory 24-hour method. Deviating provisions from collective agreements or works agreements cannot be taken into account.
To determine whether the meal allowance is calculated according to the rules applicable to employees of German or Austrian companies, the system uses the country of the invoice profile specified for the travel booking or the expense report.
Calculating the meal allowance:
Open the trip for which you want to record a meal allowance, or create an expense report.
In the Expenses section, select Meal Allowance (AT) and click Create receipt.
On the Per Diem page, adjust the travel period under Travel data country 1 (Start Date & Time / End Date & Time) and select the Per diem rate for the country visited.
If you travelled to several countries, add them via Add country; you can delete an additional country again via Remove. When switching to another country, the time of the border crossing is decisive and must be entered accordingly. If a country was only transited, tick Transit – the per diem rate of the destination country then applies for that calculation period.
Finally, confirm that this is a business trip within the meaning of the Austrian Income Tax Act ("EStG") and click Calculate duration.
In the second step (Additional Meal Expenses), enter the Departure Location and Arrival Location for each country as a full address – including for pure transit. This entry has no effect on the calculation and is only required for tax purposes; mandatory fields are marked with *.
Next, record your meals: enter the number of Day(s) with Lunch OR Dinner and Day(s) with Lunch AND Dinner for the respective country. Also enter any Privately paid overnight stays.
Click Calculate meal allowance to complete this step.
For trips abroad, in line with the Austrian travel expenses regulation for federal employees (Reisegebührenvorschrift), no reduction is applied for one business meal per day; with two business meals, only 1/3 of the applicable maximum rate is granted.
The meal allowance has now been calculated in accordance with Austrian regulations. On the final page you can add further details, e.g. cost centres. Click Save to complete the process.
If you want to correct the meals or the privately paid overnight stays after creation, you can do so via Edit. The system then recalculates the meal allowance automatically. You can review the created receipt again via View or remove it via Delete.
A business trip covering several countries is shown in the Expenses overview as a separate receipt per country. The info icon (ⓘ) next to the expense type shows which receipts belong together: the tooltip displays the country, the leg of the trip, and all Receipt IDs of the full trip.
Fields marked with * are mandatory and must be completed. All other fields are optional and only need to be filled in if relevant.
The Lanes & Planes APP Version 2.4.0 is able to display the option of additional countries.
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