No logbook, no travel claim. Not a reduced claim, a poorly calculated one, or a rough estimate accepted on good faith: zero. Fixing this costs nothing. Open a note on your phone today and record your opening kilometres.
Failing to track business travel means handing SARS money you're legally entitled to keep. Every Rand lost to a missing deduction is a Rand of taxable income you didn't need to declare, and it compounds every year the habit continues. It's also worth separating profit from cash flow here: you can show a strong paper profit while still losing liquidity to unnecessary tax payments caused entirely by poor administration.
The rule can be as simple as this: no travel reimbursement gets processed without an attached, compliant mileage log. SARS requires the date, destination, business purpose and total kilometres for every trip, and enforcing this at the point of reimbursement, rather than reconstructing it in February, prevents the panicked, inaccurate logs that rarely survive an audit anyway.
GPS-based mileage tracking apps let you swipe left for personal and right for business, generating a SARS-compliant PDF automatically at month-end. That removes human error from the equation entirely, and once the data exists cleanly, it becomes useful for more than just the deduction: mapping travel expenses against specific client accounts can reveal whether certain accounts are actually costing more to service than they're worth.
A business without basic expense-tracking discipline is very rarely bleeding money in only one place. Accurate logging feeds a genuine picture of operational costs, which in turn supports real budgeting, fleet planning, and pricing that properly accounts for travel time.
Start logging today. Open a note or app and record your opening kilometres now, not next month.
Tie reimbursement to the log. No compliant entry, no claim processed, no exceptions.
Use a GPS tracking app if you drive often. It removes manual error and produces an audit-ready record automatically.
Review travel costs against client accounts periodically. Use the data to check whether certain accounts are quietly unprofitable to service.
Your vehicle's make, model, year and registration, plus the date, opening and closing kilometres, destination and business purpose for every trip.
No. Travel between home and your regular place of work is classified as personal, not business.
No. SARS disallows the entire claim if you can't produce a concurrent, detailed logbook, so retroactive estimates carry no weight in an audit.
A logbook is the cheapest deduction available to you, and it costs nothing but a habit. Start today, tie it to reimbursement, and let an app do the heavy lifting. For more on tax efficiency, see our blog.
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