Vehicle and travel costs – you must keep a driving log!

Costs related to your vehicle and work related travelling is one of the most important areas of documenting your business.

You can only deduct your travel costs if you maintain an accurate driving log according to the tax authorities demands. As travel costs are a very significant part of your expenses you will save thousands of euros by making driving log a part of your daily or even hourly routine.

It might seem like a lot of work, but you absolutely need to do this to avoid back taxes and troubles with your taxation!

For every single business related drive you need to record the following information:

1. Start and end time of the trip.
2. Start location, end location and, if necessary, the route driven.
3. Kilometres driven.
4. Purpose of the trip.
5. Odometer reading at the start and end of the tip.
6. The driver of the car.
7. Total kilometres driven in the car during the year.

For more information, please read the Tax Administrations vehicle expense instructions here.

The format for the driving log is optional, you can keep it in a manual notebook, excel or any other format. To make things a bit easier we strongly recommend you use an application such as Drivers Note for tracking your drives.