Curve have charged 1.5% for an HMRC payment of £10,000

[singerstu]

Hello. I have followed this excellent forum but this is my first post. There are lots of vey clever people here so I am hoping someone can help me. My wife and I both have Curve Metal backed by Barclaycard Avios.

Each month we both pay £10,000 to HMRC for personal income tax to accumulate Avios.

There has never been a problem but this month my wife has been charged 1.5% by curve, I was not.

I cannot understand why, nothing has changed.

Could it be that the 30 days is a rolling period. I had always worked on the basis that it was a monthly allowance so I would make the payment any time during the month.

Thanks in advance.

[singerstu]

Actually I solved this but cannot delete the question. I cancelled my wife’s virgin card when I got the Barclaycard and Curve could not take the annual fee so they downgraded the card. Annoying they didn’t tell me. I have now upgraded with the new Barclaycard.

[kt74]

It’s also unhelpful that you can’t track your spend limits on Curve anywhere (£10k fronted limit, £1.5k biz card limit, etc etc – I literally need a rolling spreadsheet just for Curve payments…), but I think it’s calendar month for everything if that makes a difference to you in future (I put a lot of payments through on the 1st and 31st…)

[Toaster]

In the curve app I use My Money > Insights > categories > and assign all the fronted transactions to services and any non fronted that get auto assigned as “services” I change to something else.

You can also mark transactions as business so they are tagged as business and whatever the normal category is.

This is really helpful to keep track of spending per month.

[robkeane]

THe point that the “jeez what are you complaining about” are deliberately leaving out so that they can whinge, is that there is ZERO way of knowing if curve have incorrectly considered something as fronted, or indeed you misunderstood and YOU incorrectly considered something as fronted, and then you go to do a large fronted transaction that puts you over the limit. You can only keep a count yourself of how much fronted has been done, if you know definitively whether each and every transaction is considered as fronted or not.

[Toaster]

That is true, to be completely safe you could keep fronted off all the time and only enable it when a transaction fails (due to requiring fronted enabled) and make a note of each fronted transaction you make.

I tend to keep fronted off until I make a transaction which has previously required fronted. I use the £10k fronted allowance every month and have not been over it.