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SARS Logbook Requirements: Exactly What You Must Record

If you receive a travel allowance and want to claim a travel deduction, a logbook is not optional. It is the single document the whole claim rests on. No logbook, no deduction — SARS disallows the claim, and the full allowance stays in your taxable income.

The good news is that the actual requirement is much smaller than most people imagine. Here is precisely what has to be in it.

The two odometer readings

You need your vehicle's odometer reading on the first day of the tax year (1 March) and on the last day (28 or 29 February). The difference between them is your total kilometres for the year.

If you bought or sold the vehicle mid-year, the readings are taken on the date you acquired or disposed of it instead, and the fixed-cost portion of the claim is apportioned for the part of the year you actually had the car.

The four fields for every business trip

For each business journey, record:

• The date of the trip.
• The kilometres travelled.
• The destination — where you went, specifically enough to be identifiable.
• The reason — why the trip was business, e.g. "client meeting, Absa Sandton", not just "work".

Four fields. That is the entire per-trip requirement.

What you do not have to record

This is where most of the dread comes from, and it is misplaced. You do not have to record the details of your private trips. Not the school run, not the shops, not the weekend away.

Private kilometres are a single derived number: total kilometres minus business kilometres. You are not asked to justify it, itemise it, or break it down. It simply has to be the balance.

That asymmetry is the key to the whole exercise. The only thing you have to document in detail is business travel — and business travel leaves a trail in your calendar, your invoices and your email.

The commute is not business travel

Travel between your home and your usual place of work is private, no matter how far it is or how much you resent it. This catches people out every year, and padding business kilometres with the daily commute is one of the fastest ways to lose an audit.

Office to a client and back is business. Home directly to a client, without going into the office first, is generally business too. Home to office is not.

Why the odometer chain matters

A logbook is not just a list of business trips. It has to reconcile. Your opening reading, plus every kilometre travelled across the year — business and private — must land exactly on your closing reading.

In practice that means each day's closing odometer becomes the next day's opening odometer, unbroken from 1 March through to the end of February. A logbook where the numbers don't chain, or where the year-end total doesn't match the closing reading, is the kind of thing that turns a routine verification into a longer conversation.

This is also the part that eats an entire evening in a spreadsheet, and the part people get subtly wrong — a day skipped here, a rounding drift there, and by February the closing figure is out by 340 km with no obvious cause.

Format, and how long to keep it

There is no single compulsory form. SARS publishes an e-Logbook template each year and it is a perfectly good format, but a spreadsheet or a printed schedule carrying the same information is equally acceptable. What matters is the content, not the stationery.

Keep supporting records for at least five years from the date you submit the return. You don't send the logbook in with the return — you produce it if SARS asks, and it is safest to assume that one year they will.

The mistakes that actually cost people money

• No opening or closing reading. Without the two bookends there is no total, and without a total the claim cannot be calculated at all.
• Vague reasons. "Business", "work" and "meeting" repeated two hundred times is not a record of anything. Name the client or the purpose.
• Round numbers everywhere. A year of trips that are all exactly 50 km reads as an estimate, because it is one.
• Business kilometres exceeding total kilometres. Arithmetic that cannot be true is the first thing anyone checks.
• Claiming the commute. Covered above, and worth repeating.

Doing it without losing an evening

Everything above is mechanical: two readings, four fields per business trip, and a daily chain that has to balance to the kilometre. It is exactly the sort of work that should not be done by hand.

That is what we built LogBoek for. You enter your opening and closing odometer readings and your business trips — recurring routes like a weekly client visit go in once — and it builds the full 365-day chain, allocates the private kilometres so the year reconciles to your closing reading exactly, and exports a finished, SARS-ready PDF.

Try LogBoek free →

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