Do you need to keep a logbook for SARS?

— Claiming made easy
 

ANDRÉ SWANEPOEL, SALES AND MARKETING DIRECTOR, LITTLE LOGBOOK

SARS has changed its laws regarding business travel and fuel rebates and the onus is now on the individual to keep a detailed logbook of all business usage. If your mind immediately turns to laborious handwritten records, banish the thought immediately. Little LogBook offers you an unbelievably simple electronic solution to this requirement.

If you use a vehicle for your own business or for company kilometres, you need to keep track of the distances you travel and/or fuel usage in order to claim a travel allowance and SARS fuel rebates. In fact, all tax payers with a car need to submit a logbook to SARS with their tax return.

Without this logbook, the allocated monthly tax benefits are lost and the shortages would need to be paid back to SARS at the end of the tax year. For example, a car with a value of R250 000 with 20 000 business kilometres travelled, could result in a payment to SARS of R15 892 at the end of the year. In other words, failure to provide a log book results in an unnecessary and entirely avoidable financial penalty.

Little LogBook offers you a simple solution for tracking your vehicle movements and usage. The handy plug in and go GPS trip logger uses the latest tracking technology to electronically log your daily usage. You simply plug the device into your cigarette lighter socket or working USB port and the device records the coordinates of each trip you make. Supporting software then enables you to download a SARS compliant record of your travel for the week and allocate your trips to business or personal with just the click of a mouse.

The software allows you to view trips, speeds travelled and extract reports of all the usage. You can personalise your destination e.g. “Home” or “Office” and the instinctive software will memorise and automatically capture future trips to the same place under your personalised title.

Little LogBook enables you to generate various report types:

• The summary report provides a breakdown of business versus private kilometres over a tax year broken down into months.
• The detailed report provides a breakdown of business versus private kilometres over a tax year broken up into individual trips.
• Export reports to Excel (.csv) and Google Earth (.kml)
• Once in Excel you can input all the associated costs and formulate the spread sheet to reflect a host of results to service your specific requirement, be it for SARS fuel rebates, a tax compliant logbook or time keeping and efficiencies.

It really couldn’t be easier to keep track of your business travel and fuel usage than with a Little LogBook. This is an essential little gadget that takes care of what could be a laborious administrative task.

Life just got simpler with Little LogBook.