Could be a mass assignment issue? In your model have you set the $fillable property? It should be an array of fields that the model will accept. You can read more about it here: http://laravel.com/docs/5.1/eloquent#mass-assignment

Thanks for your feedback robgeorgeuk, i have added this to my model and i still get the same result :(

class Sme extends Model
{
    protected $table='sme';
    protected $fillable = array('country_id',
                                'bus_name',
                                'bus_address',
                                'province_id',
                                'town_id',
                                'suburb_id',
                                'bus_postal',
                                'reg_number',
                                'vat_number',
                                'bus_contact_number',
                                'bus_email',
                                'cat_id',
                                'bus_contact_person',
                                'person_number',
                                'person_email',
                                'rec_number',
                                'sec_discount',
                                'vip_discount',
                                'rec_discount',
                                'ref_discount',
                                'cus_discount',
                                'total_alloc'
                                );
}

If i do this in my controller to test it works and adds the bus_address value:

public function store(SmeAddDataRequest $request)
    {
        $smedata = new Sme;
        $smedata->bus_address = $request->bus_address;
        $smedata->save();


    }

Try this:

 public function store(SmeAddDataRequest $request)
    {
        $smedata = Sme::create($request->except('_token'));
       //please note that i discourage you to use this method for security reason, you have to put one by one

    }

@LonnyX - Are you saying that I have to do this $smedata->bus_address = $request->bus_address for each form element before saving?

you can do this:

class Sme extends Model
{
   public static  $createFields = ['define', 'fields', 'you', 'need', 'to', 'fill', 'with'] ;

}

 $smedata = Sme::create($request->only(Sme::createFields));