Cycle to Work scheme

The Cycle to Work Scheme is a UK Government tax exemption initiative to promote healthier commuting and reduce environmental pollution. It allows employers to loan cycles and safety equipment to employees as a tax free benefit.


Processing a cycle to work transaction (Summary):

  1. On the sales screen, set the ‘invoice to’ address as the company where the customer works (who will be paying for the bike), and the ‘deliver to’ address as the customer collecting the bike.
  2. Change the department to ‘New Units’ and select the bike you are selling as you would normally, adding any additional safety equipment included in the scheme underneath. When the sale is ready to complete, click ‘Finish’.
  3. On the finish screen, click ‘Account’ to book the invoice to the purchasing company’s account. Click ‘Save’ to complete the sale.
  4. When the payment arrives from the company paying for the bike: Go to contacts, find their name record and click ‘Payments’ on the left menu.
  5. On the Payments Received screen, click ‘Pre-Payment’ on the left, and enter the amount received from the company purchasing the bike. Select the payment method from the drop down menu, and click ‘Save’. This will take you back to the contacts screen.
  6. Click ‘Payments’ again, with the same contact selected to return to the payments received screen.
  7. Click ‘Pre-payment’ again, this time entering the amount to be paid by yourselves. Select the payment method as ‘Supplier Account’ then click ‘Save’. This will transfer the entered amount to the purchase ledger to pay the admin charge. (If this payment method doesn’t exist, see the section underneath for instructions on setting it up).
  8. Finally, we need to create the purchase for the admin charge. Go to Accounts > purchases and click ‘New’ on the left.
  9. The contacts screen will pop up. Search for, and select the company who paid for the bike then click ‘Return’.
  10. Fill in the invoice details, entering the ‘Inc’ value as the amount we paid by ‘Supplier Account’ earlier. For the invoice number you could put the date or something relevant to the sale like the frame number of the bike. Set the nominal code as ‘Fees & Subscriptions’. Click ‘Save’ on the left menu when you’re ready.
  11. In the payments box that pops up, click the middle ‘Payments’ button to the left of the window (Not ‘Pay Now’)
  12. This will take you through to the Payments screen where you should see a positive and a negative figure for the same amount. Just tick both of these so that the allocated balance is zero and click ‘Save’/’Save Print’.

Setting up the ‘Supplier Account’ payment method:

When you use the ‘Supplier account’ payment method, the system will transfer any allocated funds to the purchase ledger as a credit. A purchase entry is then created for the cycle to work scheme admin charge, which gets allocated to the credit.

To create the payment method:

  1. Go to settings > ‘Sales’ tab, click ‘Edit’ at the top left, then in the ‘Payment methods’ box at the bottom you should see a grey bar along the top of the box.
  2. Click on the grey bar under the ‘Name’ heading and type in ‘Supplier Account’.
  3. The ‘Display order’ column dictates the order in which the payment methods will be displayed on the sales finish screen. It is a good idea to mark your most commonly used payment methods as 1-4 so that they are displayed at the top of the list.
  4. Clicking on the ‘Nominal code’ box will present you with a drop-down menu, click the little down-arrow and select Contra Purchase from this list (code 01-08-99).
  5. Finally, tick the ‘Active’ box, untick the ‘Is Account’ box and tick the ‘Display’ box. Then click ‘Save’ at the top left.