eLogger – Electronic Logbook for SARS allowance claims

A travel allowance is any allowance paid or advance given to an employee in respect of traveling expenses for business or private purposes. With a travel allowance, you are allowed to claim back from the South African Revenue Service (SARS) and save yourself a fair amount of money when you do your tax returns.

What’s changed?

SARS have clearly stated that as of March 1, 2010, you will no longer be able to claim for a travel allowance unless you have an accurate Travel Logbook. A Travel Logbook is a book which differentiates between your business travel and personal travel. (view info on SARS website)

And so?

Well, it used to be a lot easier, you could simply put in your claim and get your money back without any hassle, but now you will need to carefully maintain a logbook, noting down all your travel, which as you can imagine is a big mission and incredibly easy to lose track or forget things, meaning that your claim won’t be accurate and you could easily be denied returns or get no returns at all!

How do I log my travels easily?

Let’s face it, the day and age of tracking things in a notebook are gone, technology has taken over. Not only does it save us a huge amount of time, but it is also accurate and doesn’t require much human interaction. This is where eLogger comes into play, a fantastic little device, which simply plugs into your cigarette socket and uses satellites to track your vehicles movements. So by plugging the logger into your vehicle, it will automatically track your vehicles movements and you’ll have a fully automated logbook!

logger unit and Cigarette adapter

Business vs Personal

If you’re on the ball, you’ll ask how the system knows whether it’s a business trip or a personal trip? With the logger system, you get a remote button, which allows you to click between business and personal travel, you click the button on and off, the system does the rest!

Remote to swap between business and personal mode

OK, it’s tracked, now what?

Once it’s time to submit your travel allowance claim to SARS, you simply remove the unit from your vehicle, plug it into your computer and the software will download your travel logs and provide you with a logbook, which you can then submit to SARS – as simple as that!

Unit comes with USB adapter and software

What does it cost?

Of course there’s a cost to the unit and the secret is calculating whether it’s worth it or not. At the end of the day, you’ll forget to manually use a logbook, don’t kid yourself, seriously. The cost of the logger unit, with software, USB adapter, cigarette connection, velcro stickers and everything else is just R1895.00 – this is once off, no catches with monthly payments and that!

Here’s a download to help you decide:

• Tax deduction claims for vehicle travel allowance
• eLogger brochure

I think you’ll quickly see that R1895.00 is nothing compared to what you can claim back.

I highly recommend this, I’m still looking for a reason to not purchase one?!

Where do I buy?

You can buy a device from the eLogger website by clicking here.

COMPETITION – I’ll be running a competition giving away an eLogger unit so click here to receive a notification when the competition launches.