If you use your personal vehicle for business travel, you can claim a mileage deduction that partially offsets fuel and running costs — but only if you keep an accurate, contemporaneous record. Tax authorities on both sides of the Channel are specific about what counts. A mileage log is not an estimate; it is a verifiable record with dates, destinations, distances, and business purposes. Here is how the rules work in the UK and EU, and how GPS tracking makes the whole process nearly automatic.
The UK rules: HMRC Approved Mileage Allowance Payments
HMRC allows employees and the self-employed to claim the following rates for business mileage in a personal vehicle:
- Cars and vans: 45p per mile for the first 10,000 miles in the tax year; 25p per mile thereafter.
- Motorcycles: 24p per mile.
- Bicycles: 20p per mile.
For an employee whose employer pays less than the approved rate, the shortfall can be claimed as a tax relief deduction. For the self-employed, the full mileage rate is deducted against taxable income. HMRC requires each journey to be logged with the date, start and end location, distance, and business purpose. "Client visit" or "site inspection" is generally acceptable; "miscellaneous" is not. Records must be kept for at least five years after the relevant tax return submission date.
EU and German rules: Kilometerpauschale
Germany's standard mileage deduction for business travel is 0.30 € per km for the first 20 km of each one-way trip, rising to 0.38 €/km for distances beyond 20 km (rates as of 2024). France, Austria, and other EU states have similar flat-rate schemes with slightly different figures — the French barème kilométrique varies by engine size and annual distance. In most EU jurisdictions, the log requirements are equivalent to the UK: date, origin, destination, distance, and business purpose are the minimum required fields for a defensible claim.
What a valid mileage log must contain
Regardless of jurisdiction, a mileage log that will hold up to scrutiny includes: the date of each journey, the start point and end point, the distance in km or miles, odometer readings at start and end where possible, and the business purpose for each trip. A GPS record from a tracking app satisfies the route and distance requirements automatically — what it cannot fill in for you is the purpose, which you must add as a brief note after each relevant trip.
How GPS tracking automates most of the work
The tedious part of mileage logging used to be writing everything down by hand immediately after every business trip before the details faded. A GPS tracking app eliminates that friction. Every recorded trip already has an exact start time, start location, end location, and distance logged with a timestamp. In PACE, the Fahrtenbuch (driving log) feature captures all of this per trip and lets you add a purpose note immediately after arriving. The result is a continuous, timestamped log that is far more defensible to an auditor than a hand-written notebook reconstructed at year end.
Exporting a format your accountant can use
Most driving apps let you export your trip log as a CSV or PDF. A spreadsheet with date, origin, destination, distance, and a purpose column satisfies the requirements of HMRC and most EU tax authorities for mileage claims. Some accountants prefer a signed printout; a dated PDF export from the app covers that. Keep a copy of the raw export alongside your filed tax records — the underlying GPS data provides additional corroboration if the claim is ever challenged. You can also export raw route data as a GPX file if you need to verify a specific journey in detail.
Separating business and personal trips
If you use the same car for both business and personal driving, you need to identify which trips were work-related. In PACE you can tag trips or use the driving log note field to mark business journeys. A simple convention — tagging all business trips immediately after they occur — is far easier than trying to retrospectively label a month's worth of drives at the end of a quarter. Personal trips do not need to be logged for tax purposes, but having a complete record means the business subset is clearly identifiable and the total annual mileage is already calculated.