Overview
The benefits that are not salary are the ones nobody can price. A canteen invoice arrives monthly with a single number on it. The minibus that collects the night shift is a standing arrangement in a supervisor’s head. And the company car that was in an accident last March produced a repair bill that somebody decided, informally, the company would absorb.
None of it is complicated. All of it is real money, and it is normally the least recorded thing in the company.
Meals: eligibility as a rule, delivery as a plan
A meal type fixes what one meal costs, when it is delivered, and what cash allowance is paid instead of it where that applies. What makes it work at scale is its eligibility rule: a criteria definition, a time window, an employee, department or position range, and a set of weekday checkboxes together decide who qualifies for which meal on which days — with nobody hand-picking names.
Exceptions get their own document: a specific employee swapped to the cash allowance, or cancelled for a date range, without disturbing the rule everyone else is on.
Delivery is then a plan. Collecting meals for a period pulls in every eligible employee — respecting both the rule and the exceptions — as a line with its meal type, delivery time, cost and status, and each line is marked as it actually happens: delivered, taken as allowance, or cancelled. What the company spent on food, and on whom, becomes a question with an answer.
Staff transport: the route, written down
A pickup plan is one driver’s daily run: which car, which driver, over which date range, and line by line which employee is collected where, dropped where, at what time, and how far that leg is. It posts nothing to the ledger — it is an operational schedule, and its value is that it exists outside one supervisor’s memory when that supervisor is on leave.
Company vehicles: what happened, what it cost, and whose fault it was
Every event on a company car is a car action — an accident, a service, a repair, a licence renewal — logged against the vehicle with the responsible employee, the meter reading before and after so mileage tracks itself, and the cost.
The field that matters is the responsible employee’s share. A car action records what proportion of the cost is charged to the driver rather than to the company, and the posting splits accordingly: the company’s share, the employee’s share and the tax each land on their own accounts. An at-fault accident is settled by a rule rather than by a conversation.
The kinds of thing that can happen to a car are a catalogue, each entry carrying its own accounting configuration so every action of the same kind posts the same way. A lighter request form exists for raising an event before the ledger-posting document is written up. Moving a car between drivers, branches or statuses is recorded as explicit current-value and new-value pairs, so the change is auditable rather than a silent overwrite. And insuring the fleet runs its own small lifecycle, from the insurer’s quote — priced by car type rather than by named vehicle — through to the policy.
Meal types and delivery plans, pickup routes, car actions and fleet insurance are documented in employee services.
