The AllGo Mastercard Gift Card works anywhere Mastercard is accepted, comes in physical and digital formats, and is structured to qualify for Ireland’s Small Benefit Scheme. For SMEs, that’s the part worth understanding properly: up to €1,500 a year can be given to each employee without triggering tax or PRSI, provided the scheme’s conditions are followed.
If you’re setting up or running a reward programme for the first time, the process is a bit more structured than just handing someone a card. Here’s what’s actually involved.
Physical or Digital+
AllGo Msstercard offers two formats. Physical cards can be sent in bulk to your office or delivered individually to employee homes. Digital+ cards are sent by email and activated through AllGo Mastercard’s “Get My eCard” app, after which they can be added to Apple Pay or Google Pay. Both formats carry a five year validity period, so there’s no pressure on staff to spend the balance quickly.
One thing worth knowing before you order either: the cards themselves can’t be customised or branded. What can be branded is the packaging around a physical card, or the greeting card that goes with it, and the messaging sent with a digital order. If you want your logo on something, that’s where it goes, not on the card.
Placing a Bulk Order
All orders go through an online order form, physical and digital are ordered separately, so if you want both formats in one round of rewards, you’ll be filling in two forms rather than one.
Every order requires an employee spreadsheet. This isn’t just a convenience feature for large batches, it’s a legal requirement. Anti-Money Laundering regulations no longer allow gift cards to be issued anonymously, so every card has to be assigned to a named recipient at the point of ordering. You can’t order a blank or unnamed card, and once a card is issued it can’t be transferred or gifted to someone else.
A few practical points that could catch people out the first time:
- Payment has to be made in full before an order is processed, because the funds you’re paying are what gets loaded onto the cards.
- Orders can’t be scheduled for an exact future date, though you can roughly control dispatch timing by adjusting when you submit the order.
- Physical cards can’t be activated in bulk on the employer’s side. Each recipient has to activate their own card for security reasons.
- If you order Digital+ cards, they go straight to the email addresses on your spreadsheet. There’s no option to have them sent to the employer for onward distribution.
For overseas staff, AllGo Mastercard Gift Cards can be used worldwide, but activation is only available to cardholders located in specific countries, so it’s worth checking this before including anyone based outside Ireland in a bulk order.
Card Values and the €1,500 Limit
You can load up to €2,500 onto an AllGo Mastercard. But if the point of the exercise is to use the Small Benefit Scheme, the value needs to stay within €1,500, because that’s the ceiling Revenue allows tax-free per employee per year.
The scheme has four conditions attached, and all four need to be met for the exemption to apply. The award can’t go over €1,500 per employee in a year, though you’re free to give less, or vary the amount between staff. You can give up to five separate awards to the same employee across the year, as long as the total stays within €1,500, so a business could give €500 in two different months and another €500 in December without anything becoming taxable. The benefit has to be non-cash, meaning it can’t be paid through payroll or loaded onto anything that allows an ATM withdrawal. And it can’t be funded by deducting the value from an employee’s salary. The company has to be invoiced and pay for it out of its own funds.
Discretionary bonuses can also be paid through the scheme, but only if the bonus isn’t written into the employee’s contract as part of their normal remuneration. Once it’s contractual, it stops qualifying.
Who Actually Qualifies
This is where a lot of SMEs assume the rules are simpler than they are, particularly around directors and owner-managed businesses.
Part-time employees qualify for the full €1,500 limit on exactly the same basis as full-time staff. Revenue makes no distinction based on hours worked.
Directors are more nuanced, a salaried director qualifies without complication, since they clearly meet the employer-employee relationship the scheme requires. A proprietary director also qualifies as long as they’re in paid employment with the company, though because proprietary directors are treated as self-employed for PRSI purposes, the overall saving works out roughly 11.15% lower than it would for a regular employee. A director paid through directors’ fees qualifies too, provided those fees are run through payroll. For two other categories, non-executive directors who receive dividend income rather than a salary, and unpaid directors, the position is less settled. We recommend receiving tax advice specific to your situation.
Sole traders themselves can’t use the scheme at all, because they don’t receive Schedule E income from their business. Their employees can, though. A self-employed person can use the scheme personally only if they’re receiving Schedule E income from their own company, meaning income tax, PRSI and USC are already being deducted from it, and even then the saving is somewhat lower than for an employed staff member, again because of the PRSI treatment.
Reporting to Revenue
Since 1 January 2024, Small Benefit awards have to be reported to Revenue under Enhanced Revenue Reporting. This doesn’t create a tax bill, it’s a reporting obligation only, and the return covers the employee’s details along with the amount awarded. Most businesses file this through their payroll software, though it can also be submitted directly through ROS.
Worth flagging too: if your company is subject to Gender Pay Reporting, Small Benefit gift cards need to be included under either Bonus Remuneration or Benefits in Kind, depending on how the award is structured.
Who Can Buy, and Who Can Receive
AllGo Mastercard is a business only product. Any non personal legal entity based in the EU or UK can buy it, subject to standard regulatory checks, but it’s not something an individual can purchase for personal use.
On the receiving end, employees are the main audience, and if someone leaves the company after a card has already been ordered for them, the order can be cancelled and refunded through AllGo Mastercard’’s cancellations and refunds process rather than the card simply going unused.
Why This Matters for SMEs Specifically
None of this is complicated once you’ve been through it once, but for a smaller business without a dedicated payroll or HR function, the details matter more than they would at a larger company with specialist staff. Getting the spreadsheet right at the point of ordering avoids delays. Understanding that payment has to clear before dispatch avoids assuming cards will arrive faster than they will. And knowing the difference between the €2,500 general load limit and the €1,500 Small Benefit ceiling avoids accidentally creating a taxable benefit by mistake. For businesses with a working director or an unusual ownership structure, it’s worth checking how that director is paid, and getting independent tax advice on the edge cases, before assuming the scheme applies.
Handled properly, bulk ordering through AllGo Mastercard gives an SME a way to reward staff that’s flexible for employees and, within the rules of the Small Benefit Scheme, free of tax for both sides.
👉 Explore gift card options for your business at allgogiftcard.com
