Help › Bookkeeping
Track mileage
Keep a CRA-ready record of business driving:
- Go to Ledger › Expenses › Mileage and use Log a trip.
- Enter the date, distance in kilometres, and purpose (and, if it's for a job, mark it billable to that job).
TALISK_HQ applies the CRA per-kilometre rate for the year the trip happened in (including the lower tier once you pass 5,000 business km) and totals your deduction. Personal trips are recorded but claim nothing, and they never count toward that 5,000. A personal trip can't be marked billable either: choosing Personal unticks it, because private driving is not something to bill a client for. Export it as a CSV for your accountant, or bill a job's trips onto an invoice.
The 5,000 km counts your whole business, not one vehicle. It adds up the business kilometres on every vehicle in these books for the calendar year, because the lower rate applies to the business once, not once per vehicle. TALISK_HQ works it out when you save the trip, so the rate is right even if you log from an older screen or an app that has not updated yet. The rate shown while you type is a preview of that same figure.
Changing an earlier trip re-rates the ones after it. If you add a trip with an earlier date, change a trip's distance, date or type, or delete one, every later trip that year moves to the rate it now falls under. That includes a trip you have already billed to a client: its deduction follows the kilometres, but the invoice keeps the amount the trip was billed at, because an invoice stores its own lines.
Back-dated trips use their own year's rate. CRA sets a new rate every January, so a trip you enter today with last year's date is claimed at last year's rate, not this year's. Rates are published back to 2015. If you enter a date before that, the deduction shows as $0.00 rather than a rate we would be guessing at, which is usually the sign of a mistyped year.
Driving in the territories is worth more per kilometre. CRA allows an extra 4 cents per kilometre for the Northwest Territories, Yukon and Nunavut, and TALISK_HQ adds it for you. It reads the Province / Territory on your business, so if the rate looks wrong, check that first: Ledger › Setup › Businesses, open the business, and set it there. The extra applies to every trip on a territorial business, so if most of your driving is outside the territories, mention it to your accountant at year-end.
Mileage is a logbook, not a ledger posting: it feeds the CRA report and your job billing, but it doesn't create a journal entry, so it won't show up on your Profit & Loss. Once a trip has been billed to a job, it's locked from editing.
Logging a trip on your phone
On the phone, a trip is logged from its job: open Work, open the job, and tap Mileage. The form opens already set to that job (change or clear the job there if the drive was for something else), and saving brings you back to the job. Enter the distance and the purpose, and tap Log trip. There is no mileage button on the Money screen; a trip that belongs to no job at all is easiest to log on a computer. The rate preview above the button counts the business kilometres already logged in these books for the year of the trip's date, across all your vehicles. Trips you marked Personal are left out of that count, which is what the 5,000 km threshold has always meant, so the rate drops to the lower tier at the right kilometre. TALISK_HQ works out the rate it saves when you tap Log trip, the same way.
If your phone cannot check this year's kilometres, for example because it has no signal, the preview says "Rate set when this trip syncs" instead of showing a rate, and you can still log the trip. TALISK_HQ works out the rate when the trip reaches it, so a trip logged in a dead zone is rated the same as any other.
If your phone cannot tell which set of books the trip belongs to, it says so and will not save. Nothing is queued and nothing is lost: open the books you want on More, then log the trip.
Letting GPS measure the drive
Tap Start trip before you set off and Stop trip when you arrive, and TALISK_HQ fills in the distance for you. You still tap Log trip yourself, so nothing is recorded until you have seen the number.
Measuring needs the screen on this page. If you switch to another tab, take a call, or your phone puts the app to sleep mid-drive, the measuring stops there. TALISK_HQ keeps what it had measured up to that point and offers it back when you return, saying plainly that whatever you drove afterwards was not measured. Take the figure if the trip was nearly over, or type the real distance from your odometer. TALISK_HQ will not guess the rest.