Gift Cards for Clients: A Guide to Corporate Gifting Etiquette in Ireland

What client gifting etiquette actually means

Corporate gifting in Ireland covers two jobs that have almost nothing in common. One is rewarding your own staff, which has a tax relief attached and a reporting duty to go with it. The other is thanking somebody outside the company: a client, a supplier, an introducer, the person who answered the phone at three in the morning during a go-live. That second job has no relief, no settled convention and considerably more ways to get it wrong.

Etiquette sounds like the soft part. In practice it reduces to three questions you can actually check. Can the recipient accept this at all? Does the gift read as thanks rather than as pressure? Will it arrive while the reason for it is still obvious?

Answer those well and a €50 gift lands better than a €250 one. Answer them badly and the €250 gift becomes a small administrative problem for somebody who was trying to have a nice week.

The usual mistake is to start from the budget. Finance sets a figure per client, somebody finds a product that fits it, and nobody asks whether the people receiving it are permitted to keep it. That question belongs first, because for a meaningful share of Irish recipients the answer is no.

The rules that decide what you can send

Three separate rule sets apply. None of them is optional, and only one of them is about tax. If you want the full tax treatment of corporate gifting, it is set out in our guide to corporate gifting in Ireland for HR and finance teams. What follows is the short version plus the two rule sets that guide does not cover.

Deductibility. Section 840 of the Taxes Consolidation Act 1997 disallows business entertainment as a deduction for income tax and corporation tax alike. Revenue's own manual puts the gift question beyond doubt: the section applies to the provision of gifts as it applies to the provision of entertainment. Entertainment provided for bona fide employees is carved out of the section, which is exactly why staff rewards and client gifts belong on separate budget lines. A client gift comes out of profit that has already been taxed, so budget it at gross cost and assume no deduction.

VAT. Revenue treats a business gift of goods costing €20 or less excluding VAT as carrying no VAT liability. Above that, the full amount is liable rather than just the excess. Vouchers are a different regime again, under the single-purpose and multi-purpose voucher rules, where a multi-brand gift card is a multi-purpose voucher and the VAT falls due on redemption rather than on issue. The two rules are not interchangeable. Put a large client campaign in front of your accountant before you commit the spend.

Who is allowed to accept it. This is the rule most often skipped, and the one most likely to embarrass you. Under the Civil Service Code of Standards and Behaviour, an officer may accept and retain gifts of modest value, subject to whatever rules their own Secretary General or Head of Office has set. Anything of more significant value must be refused or, where refusal would cause offence, handed over to their Department. Cash, gift cheques and any voucher that can be exchanged for cash may not be accepted at all, regardless of the amount. Offers from commercial interests that have or might have contractual relations with the recipient's Department must be reported to their manager for direction, and whether a procurement process is pending is one of the factors they are told to weigh. Plenty of semi-state bodies, regulated firms and large private companies run their own version of the same policy.

There is also a criminal-law backstop worth knowing about, even though it will not touch most commercial gifting. Section 14 of the Criminal Justice (Corruption Offences) Act 2018 provides that where a gift is given to an official by somebody with an interest in how that official discharges their functions, it is presumed to have been given and received corruptly unless the contrary is proved. That presumption attaches to officials rather than to ordinary commercial counterparties, but it is the reason gift policies in and around the public sector are as firm as they are.

None of the above is tax or legal advice. Anything unusual goes to your accountant or your compliance lead before the money is committed.

When to send, what to send and how much

Occasions that work

The best client gifts attach to something specific. A contract signed. A project delivered on a date somebody fought for. A referral that turned into work. A person moving off the account after three years. The occasion does the explaining, so the gift does not have to.

The occasion that works least well is the one everybody uses. A gift arriving unprompted in the second week of December, in the same week as eleven others, reads as a seasonal habit rather than as thanks. If Christmas is the only slot you have, send early enough to be the first rather than the eleventh, and write something that refers to the year rather than to the season.

Avoid the week before a tender, a renewal or a pitch. Even a modest gift changes shape when a procurement decision is pending, which is precisely the factor the civil service guidance tells recipients to weigh.

How much to spend

There is no standard figure, and the recipient's policy sets the ceiling rather than your budget. What most Irish businesses settle on looks roughly like this:

• A thank-you to an individual contact: enough to register as a real gesture, not enough to require a conversation with their manager.
• A milestone on a significant account: more, and usually split across the team who did the work rather than concentrated on the person who signed.
• Anything a recipient would have to declare: stop and ask first. A gift that creates paperwork is not a gift.

Treat those as common starting points rather than rules.

What to send

Hampers and branded goods share a weakness. You are choosing on behalf of somebody whose tastes you do not know, and you find out you were wrong only if they tell you, which they will not. A gift card moves the choice to the person receiving it, which is why it survives so well in a business context where you know the company better than the person.

The practical requirement is that it be easy to accept and easy to use. No fee taken off the top. No expiry date arriving before they have got round to it. A range wide enough that the recipient is not being quietly told what to like. An OptionsCard carries no purchase fee and nothing deducted from the balance afterwards, holds its value for five years, and can be swapped for gift cards from over 70 Irish and international brands, or split across more than one.

Getting the timing right

Send within a fortnight of the thing you are thanking them for. After a month it reads as an afterthought. On the day of the decision itself it can read as a transaction.

Where client gifting goes wrong

Four failures account for most of it, and none of them is exotic.

Sending before checking. The cheapest control in the whole process is a line in the account notes recording whether this client's organisation has a gifts policy and what it says. Ask once, write it down, and nobody has to guess again.

Sending something cash-like. Cash, cheques and anything convertible to cash are the first thing any gift policy rules out, and the civil service version rules them out at any value. A prepaid card that can be emptied at a cash machine sits in that category.

Sending to the wrong person. A gift to the individual who signed the contract can look like payment for signing it. A gift to the team that delivered the work rarely does. Where a decision is recent or pending, the safer address is the team.

Treating it as a marketing spend. A gift with your logo on the wrapping and a call to action inside it is not a gift. If you want the branding, brand the delivery and leave the gift alone.

Set up client gifting you can send in a minute

Client gifts are easier to get right when the recipient makes the final choice and nothing is deducted along the way. Sign up at app.optionscard.ie/register to send individual or bulk OptionsCards, manage budgets and purchase orders by department, and keep the client side of your gifting on its own line where it belongs. If you would rather talk through how it fits your account structure first, email us at [email protected].