For many owners, yes. EOTs have become a sensible option for owner-led haulage businesses in recent years. The reasons are practical: the workforce is long-serving, the value of the business is in the team and the customer relationships, and a trade sale to a consolidator can be culturally hard on the people who built the business. The tax position is favourable for the seller (gains exempt on the qualifying sale to the EOT), but only if the structure is right and the company can support the deferred consideration over time. We model the cash flow of the deferred payments against forecast trading hard, because that is where EOTs come unstuck.

HMRC publishes a national overnight subsistence rate for drivers using sleeper cabs. Paying that without further evidence is allowed under HMRC's national agreement. If you want to pay more than the national rate, you need a bespoke scheduling agreement supported by sampled receipts, and you need to renew it. The breakfast and meal allowance positions sit alongside this and are easy to get wrong. A documented policy and a clean audit trail tends to resolve an inspection quickly.

Often yes, where the business has built something genuinely novel in its operating systems. We have seen valid claims around bespoke routing software, customer integration platforms and emissions tracking developments. Buying off-the-shelf telematics does not qualify. Genuine in-house development might. The line has tightened in the last two years and HMRC are reviewing claims closely, so the documentation needs to be in order.

The starting point is honest allocation. Fixed costs need to be spread to the work that uses them. Variable costs need to be tagged at the point they are incurred, ideally through fuel card data and tachograph or TMS records. The output is a per-customer, per-route view that the operations team trusts. Most operators we work with arrive at this within one or two reporting cycles. The first month is hard. After that the discipline carries itself.

A serious answer requires understanding the deal in front of you, but the broad shape is: confidentiality, indicative offer, financial and operational due diligence, contract negotiation, funding case, completion, and then the post-deal integration that is often the harder part. The integration of the acquired payroll, fuel cards and TMS into your existing setup is usually underestimated. We tend to start the integration plan during due diligence, not after completion.

The mainstream asset finance market is open, although terms are firmer than they were two years ago. Lenders look harder at residual values on new fuel types, and harder at customer concentration risk on the order book. A well-prepared funding case with three-year forecasts and a clear story on the underlying contracts will still get done. A vague request often will not.

The capital cost is significantly higher than diesel equivalents and the residual values are less certain. The operational cost can be lower if depot charging is properly set up and route patterns suit. The tax position is more favourable on capital allowances, particularly under full expensing. Most operators we work with are running pilots on specific routes rather than committing the whole fleet, and the financial modelling matters because the payback is sensitive to electricity contract pricing.

Usually three things. First, the management information needs to be clean enough that a buyer can see the underlying performance without forensic work, which includes normalising one-off items. Second, the operational data behind the financial numbers needs to be consistent, particularly customer margins and fleet productivity. Third, the things that scare buyers (unresolved HMRC enquiries, weak contract documentation, undocumented family payments) need to be tidied. The two to three years before a sale are when the value gets built, or quietly lost.