Ask most agents what they spend on their vehicle each year and you will get a shrug. Showings, listing appointments, open houses, the drive to the lawyer's office, the second trip back because the lockbox code was wrong. It adds up to thousands of kilometres, and almost none of it gets written down.
That is a problem at tax time, because your accountant cannot work out your vehicle deduction without knowing how much of your driving was for business. Not an estimate. A number, backed by records.
What a mileage logbook actually needs
The Canada Revenue Agency expects a logbook that records, for each business trip:
- The date of the trip
- Where you started and where you went
- The reason for the trip
- The number of kilometres driven
On top of the trips themselves, you need your odometer reading at the start of the year and at the end of the year. Those two numbers give your total kilometres driven. Your business kilometres divided by your total kilometres is your business use percentage, and that percentage is what your accountant applies to your vehicle costs.
This is the part agents most often get wrong. Your deduction is not a flat rate per kilometre. The per-kilometre rate you may have heard about is what employers use when reimbursing employees, and it does not apply to a self-employed agent filing their own return. Your accountant works from your real costs — fuel, insurance, maintenance, lease or loan interest — reduced by your business use percentage.
Why a notebook in the glovebox stops working
Paper logbooks fail for the same reason shoebox receipts fail. They work in January and they are abandoned by March. Then in April you are trying to reconstruct a year of driving from your calendar, your showing history and your memory.
A reconstructed logbook is weak. If your return is ever reviewed, the records are expected to support the claim. Notes written eleven months after the drive do not.
How BrokerBooks handles it
BrokerBooks now includes a mileage log built for how agents actually work. Each trip takes a few seconds to record: the date, where you drove from and to, the purpose, the distance, and whether it was one way or a return trip. Return trips are doubled for you, so you enter the distance once.
You enter your odometer reading at the start of the year and again at year end. From there, BrokerBooks shows you four figures at a glance: your business kilometres, your total kilometres, your business use percentage, and how many trips you have logged.
When it is time to file, you export the full logbook as a CSV — every trip, with the date, route, purpose and kilometres — and hand it to your accountant along with your business use percentage and your vehicle costs. They decide how it is treated on your return. BrokerBooks keeps the records; your accountant does the tax work.
Start today, not in January
You do not need to wait for a new tax year. Record your current odometer reading, start logging trips from today, and you will have several months of real records by the time you file. That is considerably better than nothing, and far better than guessing.
The agents who claim their vehicle costs with confidence are not the ones with the best memory. They are the ones who wrote it down as they went.
Start a free trial of BrokerBooks and log your first trip in under a minute.