The money sitting in your odometer

Most tradespeople drive thousands of miles a year for work and claim back a fraction of what they are owed. Not because they are not entitled to it, but because logging every trip in a notebook is the kind of admin that falls apart by the second week of January. The mileage is real money, and for a lot of sole traders it quietly leaks away every single year.

What HMRC actually lets you claim

If you use your own vehicle for business, HMRC lets you claim a flat rate for every business mile under what they call simplified expenses. For cars and vans the rate is 45p a mile for the first 10,000 miles in the tax year, then 25p a mile after that. Motorbikes are 24p a mile.

Those rates are meant to cover your fuel, your insurance, your servicing and the wear on the vehicle, so you do not claim those running costs separately on top. The catch is simple. To claim it, you have to be able to show the miles. That means a record of where you went, when, and why.

Why the notebook never works

Be honest about how the paper logbook usually goes. It starts well in April. By June it is in the door pocket under a chip wrapper. By the time your accountant asks for your figures, you are guessing, and when you guess you almost always guess low. A conservative guess feels safe, but it is money you have genuinely spent and are simply choosing not to claim.

The miles add up faster than most people think. Forty miles a day, five days a week, comes to roughly 10,000 business miles a year. At 45p that is around 4,500 pounds you can put against your tax bill. Miss half of it through poor records and you have handed back more than two grand of relief for no good reason.

How Trade Pilot tracks it for you

Trade Pilot makes logging your business journeys quick, so you are not relying on memory or a notepad. Add a trip in seconds with the date, the route and the distance, ready to drop straight into your year end figures. No spreadsheets, no sitting down on a Sunday trying to reconstruct three months of driving from your diary.

Because it is all in one place alongside your quotes and invoices, your mileage is not some separate chore you keep forgetting. You log each trip as you go, so when the tax return comes round the number is already there waiting for you.

Keep a record that holds up

If HMRC ever asks you to back up a claim, a vague total is not much help. A clear trip by trip log with dates and distances is exactly the kind of evidence that settles the question quickly. Good records protect you as much as they pay you, and they take the worry out of claiming what you are properly owed.

Stop leaving it on the table

Mileage is one of the easiest tax savings a tradesperson can make, and one of the most commonly missed. The work is already being done. The only thing standing between you and the relief is a proper record of the miles. Let Trade Pilot keep that record for you, and claim back every mile you drive.