How Togra handles AVEC

# How Togra handles AVEC

The product-side companion to AVEC — the UK Audio-Visual Expenditure Credit: where the UK-side credit lives in Togra for NI-based and cross-border producers. For the statutory detail read that entry; this page is the workflow.

1. Who sees it

AVEC is the UK credit, so Togra surfaces it only where it applies: the AVEC tracker (Airgead → Tax credits) lists NI, cross-border and UK projects — an ROI-only project never sees it. For a NI-incorporated producer it's the primary credit, filed exactly as a London producer would; for an ROI producer it's the UK side of a cross-border stack alongside S481 — see cross-border productions for how the two halves split.

2. Qualification — the BFI side

• The Cultural Test has its own scoring surface — Film, HETV and Animation TV variants, scored criterion by criterion with a live points total — and the tracker reads the pass/fail status straight from it, so qualification and the money are never tracked in two places. See the UK Cultural Test.
• BFI Diversity Standards (the Standards A–D / Diamond demographic workflow) run on their own surface with a publishable pack for the BFI.
• The tracker's IFTC eligibility checklist walks the Independent Film Tax Credit conditions for low-budget features claiming the enhanced rate — it's a checklist because IFTC is binary: miss one condition and you're back on the standard rate.

3. The money — HMRC side

The tracker's cap calc & credit panel computes qualifying UK core expenditure against the 80% cap and shows the projected net credit at the applicable rate (34% film/HETV · 39% animation/children's · IFTC-enhanced where the checklist passes) — the same shared finance-calc constants the budget and finance plan use, so the figure can't drift between surfaces. CT600 submissions are logged per accounting period: AVEC is claimed through UK corporation tax, so the unit of filing is the accounting period, not the production.

4. The stacking rules — where AVEC meets the Irish credits

This is the part that bites cross-border producers, and Togra encodes it rather than leaving it to memory:

• AVEC is not EU state aid. Post-Brexit UK funding (AVEC, BFI, NI Screen) sits outside the EU cumulation pool, so it does not count toward S481/S487A's 50% state-aid cap — and equally, the 60% cross-border allowance applies only between EU member states. The state-aid engine applies both rules.
• One spend, one credit. The same expenditure can't qualify on both sides of the border; the cross-border split-budget tooling keeps the UK and Irish qualifying pools distinct.
• The NI Screen application packs disclose the AVEC stack (rate route, Cultural Test points, IFTC status) in the form NI Screen expects, pulled live from the tracker.

5. The UK/NI toolkit around it

Because an AVEC claim implies UK-side production admin, Togra carries the supporting set: UK payroll calculations, UK residual rate cards, the UK company profile, and the funder progress-report surfaces — see jurisdiction variants for how Togra switches statutory regimes per project territory.

6. Where things live