Happay’s new-age, food card programme enables tax savings for employees, is 100% compliant with RBI regulations and the Income Tax Act, and helps HRs manage employee meal benefits in real time – while at the same time simplifying and automating the entire process.
Managing meal benefits has been a regular HR nightmare for too long
Okay, let’s face it. Managing any kind of employee benefits at all is no walk in the park. Given the complexity of employee grades and salaries, designations, industry standards, authorisation processes – and, most importantly, not to forget regulatory compliance – it’s no wonder that HR professionals are all but ready to tear their hair out when it comes to implementing tax benefits for employees.
To make things worse, meal benefits come with a whole world of pain entirely their own – with as many clauses, conditions, exceptions (and permutations and combinations of these) as you can imagine. And as if that isn’t enough, this is one area that required learning, unlearning and re-learning as manual, paper-based processes came and went in keeping with regulatory changes.
Little wonder then that the very mention of meal benefits programmes is enough to make the most seasoned of employees hesitate – regardless of role, department, or designation. It’s even less of a surprise that several employees don’t even avail of the benefit, choosing instead to keep a safe distance from the resulting confusion and complications.
Why are Meal Benefits difficult to manage?
Before the advent of food cards, HR teams followed a tedious, long process for distributing and managing paper-based meal vouchers to their employees. What’s more, since these were paper vouchers, they incurred substantial overheads, and also couldn’t be tracked in real time. Employees suffered as well – many ended up losing more vouchers than they used, whether physically or due to lapsed expiry dates. They also frequently had to give up on change due back to them because vendors wouldn’t pay them back in cash and had to keep counting their vouchers to calculate remaining balances.
In 2017, RBI in its draft guidelines for wallets said that it will not allow prepaid payment instruments (PPIs) in the form of paper vouchers. It instructed companies issuing meal vouchers under B2B arrangements in paper voucher form to issue PPIs in electronic form, including cards. Meal voucher providers started digitising their meal vouchers through food cards.
- However, in spite of this digitisation, some serious challenges still persist.
- Not all food cards are Visa and Mastercard certified, hence they can be used only at select merchants with whom the food card provider has a tie-up.
- These card providers also charge a hefty commission to the food merchants (typically in the range of 2-5%). In order to compensate the expenses that the merchants incur because of the commission, they increase their food price (beyond the MRP) and pass on the burden to the employees who are purchasing the food using cards.
- Apart from the commission, another reason for discontent among food merchants is that the food card provider reimburses their money 20-25 days later. Both the commission and the reimbursement time makes such cards an unprofitable mode of payment. It’s no surprise that many food merchants do not accept the cards at all due to these issues.
Happay’s food card solves all of these challenges. We help HRs teams manage meal benefits easily and help employees take full advantage of tax savings on meal benefits.
Happay’s new age and automated food card programme
The Lord of the cards: One card to rule them all
- With the Happay food card, HR teams can manage pan organisation meal benefits from a single, centralised platform, and with zero paperwork. Our card offers:
- Multi-wallet functionality: Funds for different employee benefits can be loaded on one card via different digital wallets.
- Unbeatable accessibility and visibility: Our cards can be used everywhere – online as well as offline – and at all stores that accept card payments. What’s more, all transactions and balances can be tracked in real time via a mobile app as well as e-reports, allowing for better expense control.
- Unprecedented acceptance network: Choose from a network of over 3 lakh food merchants across the country (Our card is Visa and Mastercard certified).
- Configurable business rules: Rules, benefits and ceilings can be amended, added or deleted to adapt to organisational workflows.
- Bank-grade security: The Happay card comes with multiple layers of security and encryption, ensuring full safety of your money.
- 100% RBI and income tax rules compliance: Our card is automatically and fully compliant with all relevant regulations, which eases the burden of compliance off the shoulders of the end-user.
What’s more, HR professionals can literally set up the programme and then forget about having to run it – all it takes is three simple steps to get it up and running automatically:
The benefits
- The benefits of the Happay food card are manifold:
- End-to-end digital process: From allocating and tracking funds to using, reporting and reconciling them, everything can be done via a mobile app, in real time – without papers or spreadsheets.
- Single-click distribution of allowances: Allowances can be allocated to all employees instantaneously via an intuitive, easy-to-use dashboard.
- Easy tracking and analysis: Employees can easily check their card balance on their mobile apps. On the other hand, HR teams have visibility at all times too – they can check employees’ usage analytics at any point of time.
- Zero overhead costs: The Happay food card eliminates all logistics, storage and additional resource costs, making for a truly effective AND efficient process.
- Customisable limits and policies: Define when (day and time), by whom and for what the cards can be used with our flexible limits and policies.
- Higher take-home pay as well as tax savings: Employees benefit from increased income in hand, while at the same time reducing their taxable income, making for significant savings all around.
Conclusion
Meal benefit programmes are intricate and complicated processes, making them inherently difficult to manage manually – not to mention prone to the risk of non-compliance and related complications. However, businesses everywhere need them. But it still isn’t practical to hold HR teams responsible for implementing them on their own – what’s needed is the support of a robust digital system that better manages the programme, in the process making everyone’s life just a little simpler. Given the growing demands in the modern-day work environment, the last thing employees need is further aggravation and frustration.
With Happay’s simple, hassle-free food card, you can avoid just that – and instead enhance employee trust and engagement, in the process encouraging more employee opt-ins.
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