Where can you use your meal vouchers? Let’s understand

Meal vouchers are one of the most common benefits offered by companies for employees to save taxes. They primarily serve the purpose of helping employees save tax on food money spent towards lunch/breakfast/ tea/snack at work. In strict legal sense, meal vouchers are non-transferable and not equivalent to money in any way.

They can only be used to purchase ready-to-eat food and non-alcoholic beverages.

Voucher usage till now:

Until now, paper-based vouchers dominated the space and once distributed to employees, there was no way for a company to find out if the usage of vouchers were being done as per legal guidelines. For example, paper-based vouchers could be used at supermarkets to not only buy food but also non-food items. Such misuse of meal vouchers were common till now. However, with advancement in technology and RBI’s mandated change in regulations towards meal vouchers, digital meal vouchers have come into place.

Digital meal vouchers offer great convenience to both employees and also to corporates. While employees do not have to deal with settling change and losing paper vouchers, employers too are enjoying unique advantages of such solutions.

With digital vouchers, corporates can now customise the solution to preset rules of usage which are more in line with the company’s internal policies.

The way forward:

With this flexibility in planning and managing a programme, a company not only offers tax savings to employees by granting meal benefits, but also ensures their employees use their vouchers in a legally compliant way.

So, to address the question of where can employees use meal vouchers, here’s where:

• Any food store selling ready-to-eat meals
• At restaurants, barring the money spent on alcohol
• For meals at office cafeteria
• Any other stores, selling food and non-alcoholic beverages, where the company may specifically allow usage

The phasing out of paper vouchers and welcoming of digital vouchers by the RBI has resulted in a complete face lift of meal vouchers in India. While convenience of using and accessing the benefit has increased for employees, corporates are enjoying more control on the solution being offered. The move definitely prevents misuse of vouchers and makes way for responsible use of employee benefits.