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There is great confusion, especially among professionals, about how to invoice travel expenses (locomotion, accommodation, meals) when the client is willing to pay them.

So here we have two possibilities. We can consider it as a supply (“suplido”) or as a performance of the professional activity (re-invoicing the expense in the invoice that is issued to the client).

Our advice is to consider these travel expenses as a part of the income from professional activity. Therefore, you have to know that they should be subject to VAT and the corresponding withholding. The argument for why our advice is based on the explanation that the DGT offers us in consultation 1896-03 of 11/13/2003.

According to this query, the “suplidos” suppose the following mechanics: expenses that correspond to the client and that are satisfied by the professional prior provision of funds or through subsequent reimbursement.

Qualifying the professional’s travel expenses as suplidos requires, to make it viable, the change of the subject that produces the expense. That is, considering that the travel expenses are not made by the professional who travels to a particular place to provide their services. Instead, the “owner” of the expense is hiring it for demanding the provision of services in that place.

Logically, we cannot accept the previous approach since the person who produces the expense is the professional who makes the trip. Therefore, it is not possible to speak of suplidos or, in the cases in which the client directly satisfies the expense, of amounts that are outside the professional income.

With an example, it will be much more precise:

We are going to continue with an example of the maintainer of a computer system. This computer scientist lives in Madrid. He has a client in Toledo who hires him to make a change in his computer network. 

As a result of the inconvenience of being without a computer network for the client during the work, our IT specialist proposes to concentrate the work in 2 days. And the client accepts. But all this will suppose to our IT specialist several additional expenses of displacement, maintenance, and accommodation. 

So, he makes his calculations, and the costs would be the following:

In conclusion, since the client has agreed to bear all the additional expenses, the items that he must include in his invoice must be the following:

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