When you own your own limited company, and the company does not own your vehicle, you are able to charge back to your company a travel expense based on your business travels. You must maintain a log book of the information that details the date and particulars as to the purpose of the trip to support the claim.
The expense, when reimbursed, is not be be added to your income, because it is a reimbursement of your expenses. The amount must not exceed that as allowed by CRA, otherwise, a taxable benefit would be applied.
In order for you to track your business trips, and personal trips, and providing you are using a cell phone, which doubles up as a GPS device, our suggestion is for you to use a tracking app, like MileIQ, which can provide to you the reporting necessary to support the claim.
MileIQ provides to accountants, a promotion code which reduces the annual cost of this service by 20%, resulting in about $50 annual cost for using the app, more than 40 times per month. Most of the business people I know, drive more than 40 times on business each month, but it doesn’t hurt for you to try before you buy, and get a feeling for the benefit.
The MileIQ app runs in the background on your iOS or Android phone and logs every drive automatically. You swipe each drive to classify it as business or personal, and MileIQ calculates the value of your deductible mileage. You can add details like parking, tolls, purpose and vehicle and have a complete, accurate mileage log practically effortlessly! Your log gets synced to the cloud, so you can get to it any time, even years down the road. You’ll be able to claim the full value of your mileage deduction with total peace of mind.
This year, MileIQ is offering my clients a 20% discount on annual unlimited-drive plans. Subscriptions are regularly priced at $5.99/mo. or $59.99/yr. (Here’s how to redeem promo codes.)
You can try MileIQ by downloading the free app for iOS or Android. To get an annual unlimited-drive plan at a 20% discount, sign in to your MileIQ web dashboard, click “Get Unlimited Drives” and use promo code JHOL701A at checkout. (Note that the discount is not valid for in-app upgrades or monthly plans.)
Want more information? Take a look at this flyer.
I hope you’ll give MileIQ a try and let me know what you think. (And remember, the subscription is usually deductible too — at 54.5 cents for every business mile in 2018, it’ll pay for itself in just a few drives!)
This is their website: MileIQ
Have a nice day..
Jack