About Our Salary Sacrifice Business Profile API

Our Salary Sacrifice Business Profile API sets the business data to use for a Salary Sacrifice analysis.

The data provided by the user determines factors such as the rate of business tax relief and employer pensions contributions for the business.

The profile also allows the user to indicate whether or not the business will recover from the employee the additional costs of:

• unrecoverable VAT on contract hire rentals; and
• business tax relief disallowed for cars which exceed the CO2 emissions limits

Depending on the profile selections the unrecoverable VAT and disallowed tax relief will be added to the monthly amount charged to the employee for the car.

Once the business profile is completed the user can move on to select a vehicle, finance and driver profile to complete the Salary Sacrifice analysis.

Dataset

The dataset provided covers the key business information on:

• business tax rate;
• employer's pension contributions rate;
• VAT recovery rate (particularly for organisations which can't recover VAT);
• VAT accounting periods;

The dataset should be provided as a POST in a secure url string under HTTPS - an HTTP POST will not receive a success response and will not change the dataset held on our server for the user session.

The response will be a verification dataset in your preferred 'json' or 'xml' format (declare this in 'd_Type' element of the POST request string) acknowledging the POST has been processed.

JSON is the default type for the dataset if no 'd_Type' is set.

Our Demo

Our demonstrator provides an illustration of how the API processes busines profile information using XML.

To process a business profile just complete the selection and text boxes below with the data set out above.

We will display the relative HTTPS {POST} request for the business profile and the acknowledgement response. You can copy and paste the sample request strings into a browser address bar to see the raw XML data returned for the request (right click on the browser page displayed and you will see the XML dataset).

You can also substitute XML for JSON when you perform the 'copy|paste' exercise.

{POST} Requirements

The {POST} request follows standard HTTPS key:value pair protocols. No response will be given for an HTTP request.

The actual {POST} request requires a pre-existing successful security login and session token ('ASP.Net_SessionId').

For the demonstration no existing token is required - a temporary token will be issued with the response if no earlier session token has been issued.

Verification

Once you have created a business profile click on the '{POST}' button to see a returned acknowledgement dataset.

You will also see the entire {POST} request string as an example and the returned dataset structured as a typical online representation of XML for the business profile.

This will include the dataset XML node descriptions so that you can see the schema.

Security

A session token is created on initial login and must be included as a cookie with all HTTPS {POST} requests or the request will fail.

If the user's browser does not allow functional cookies then the {POST} request will become orphaned and the request cannot be linked to any other requests in the same session.

If the session token is not included then the session will be terminated, any data created in the session may be erased at the server and the user may need to re-authenticate with a new session.

For security reasons the HTTPS protocol must be used for all {POST} requests so that all data passed between the browser and the server is encrypted, including the session token.

Pair:Value Summary

d_type: 'xml' or 'json' for the required return data type (json if not specified)
b_ctr: the profits tax rate for the business as an integer (e.g. '19') or 'double' (e.g. '23.5') type
b_vrr: an integer or double type variable for the rate at which the business can recover VAT (currently '20' for a business able to recover all VAT) - use '0' for businesses unable to recover VAT and, for example, '10' for a business able to recover half of its input VAT.
b_vper: a string variable in upper case for denoting the VAT accounting periods for the business ('A' for Annual, 'Q' for Quarterly and 'M' for Monthly VAT accounting)
b_vrec: a string variable in upper case for whether or not the business recovers from the employee the unrecoverable VAT on contract hire rentals ('Y' for 'Yes', 'N' for 'No')
b_trec: a string variable in upper case for whether or not the business recovers from the employee the disallowed tax relief on contract hire rentals for cars with 'high' CO2 emissions ('Y' for 'Yes', 'N' for 'No')
b_prate: business's pension contributions rate for a company pension scheme (if applicable) - a blank or 0 entry is also permitted