I’ve driven 1.4 million Km ( sorry Greta ), vast majority for work, came to that number by added up all the fleet cars, vans and personal vehicles and thought I had lost the ability to math. Nothing like handing back a fleet vehicle to the fleet company 120k km over the contractually agreed cap, even though it was getting serviced on time and the dealer has to ring them with the odometer reading every time for approval before the service could be commenced, drrrrr. Doing that many Km, I recall taking a VE commodore wagon to the dealer for service twice in a month on a few occasion.
God I miss fleet vehicles. Weekly fluids check and drive it like it’s stolen. Was a sad day when the parent companies CFO wrapped his head around how much the company was paying for FBT on company vehicles.
Anyway, again I’m not a CPA. Allowances payed to you by the employer are taxed. My staff got screwed about 2016 when everyone lost fleet vehicles and we were forced onto a car allowance. Then payroll fucked up and didn’t include the allowance in payg calculations for 10 months, everyone had gone and bought cars, mostly rent-a-bombs and not lease, they didn’t want to trash a leased vehicle with piles of tools and equipment and take a hit at the end of the lease when it’s was their money on the line. The staff member who has shattered the most glass doors/hatches of course had the strongest feeling about this, he also somehow side swiped the letterbox at work, nothing else on the grass for many meters. Full length scratch on the side of a vw caddy that was 3 weeks old.
Anyway. You can claim vehicle costs at tax time. Keeping all records is a must. My advice from seeing it go horribly wrong for my staff, is to use a second, dedicated phone that’s got a sim, google maps, and google maps is fully configured for location tracking. You can make google maps fully GPS track the phone’s location. It’s a sure fire way to avoid the ato getting sus, the legislation says log book as part of the proof required for claims on any method, it doesn’t say hand written log book. You dump the google maps data into a spreadsheet, along with your odometer reading on july 1 and June 30, and overlay your time sheet data to satisfy the ATO’s “purpose of journey” requirements. The google maps data has the Km data you need so you just run simple formulas down the spreadsheet to satisfy the ATO’s odometer start and end of each trip requirements. Make sure if sharing this spreadsheet to copy and paste VALUES only, otherwise your data is going to look sus and it integrity questioned, as one nameless staff member found out the hard way.
Review the google maps data regularly to confirm the phone running google maps hasn’t stuffed up, you can have a web browser on your pc logged into multiple google accounts simultaneously and just flip between them, that sim in the phone was to get the google maps data out in close to real time. Don’t kid yourself that you’ll do this regularly the hard way. One staff member had the ato hassle him that the claimed Km costs was not all business, being able to furnish the full data quickly shut them up. Especially with a 1200 line spreadsheet, and all personal trips clearly identified, with gps data to back it up. The ato applies industry/sector averaging, if your claim is an outlier, you are automatically selected for review, don’t satisfy their suspicions well enough, it’s fine and punishment time, and if someone really doesn’t like you, audit time by some paper pusher Poodle probably knew(or worse, trained), who has 587 other audits to complete for the month and has 3 minutes to allocate to you.
One variation of dealing with your employer, is to negotiate a car allowance with a fuel card. Agree to a Km per year cap if you can. Some, not all but some businesses will stuff up and forget to declare the fuel card as a fringe benefit on your payg lodgements, for some cream on the top. The fuel card on the employer (with or without fbt) puts the rising fuel cost risk onto them, not you.w
