Every business kilometre you drive is worth money - but only if you can show it. The Belastingdienst (the Dutch tax authority) wants a record per trip, not a total at the end of the year. This guide explains what the rules are for a private car and for a company car, what each trip must contain, and how to keep the record without ever writing anything down.
The mileage log (rittenregistratie) is part of Pro: 30 days free, then €9.99 excl. VAT per month. Invoicing stays free forever.
A mileage log is evidence. When you claim kilometres as a cost, or when you claim that you hardly used a company car privately, the inspector does not take the total on trust - they want to see how it was built up. That is why the record has to be kept per trip, with addresses and dates, and why it has to be complete: a log with three weeks missing is not a log, it is an estimate.
There are two situations in which this matters, and they work in opposite directions:
The notebook in the glove box rarely survives either test. The trips you forget are exactly the ones from three weeks ago, and reconstructing them from your calendar is what an inspector calls "not contemporaneous".
As an entrepreneur (a zzp'er - self-employed without staff - or the owner of an eenmanszaak, a sole proprietorship) who uses a private car for the business, you deduct a fixed amount of €0.23 per business kilometre in 2026. That amount is meant to cover all costs of the car: fuel, parking, tolls, insurance, maintenance, depreciation. You do not deduct those separately on top; the kilometre rate is the whole deal.
Do not confuse this with the untaxed allowance an employer may pay an employee, which is €0.25 per kilometre in 2026. That is a different rule for a different situation. As a business owner using your own car, €0.23 is your figure. Amounts change from year to year, so check the current rate on belastingdienst.nl or ask your accountant before you file.
Say you drive 400 business kilometres a month - a few client visits a week plus a trip to a supplier. That is 400 × €0.23 = €92 per month, or about €1,104 a year in deductible costs. Without a log, those kilometres are worth nothing, because you cannot prove them. The same 400 kilometres also cost you more than a subscription to the software that records them.
If the car is on the books of the business, the Belastingdienst assumes private use and adds bijtelling - a percentage of the car's value - to your taxable income. The way out is to prove that you drove fewer than 500 private kilometres in the calendar year, and the only accepted proof is a sluitende rittenregistratie: a log that accounts for every kilometre on the odometer, business and private alike.
Two things follow from that. First, with a company car you must record private trips as well, not just business ones - the log has to add up to the odometer. Second, the log has to be kept as you go. A record reconstructed in January for the previous year will not stand. This is the situation in which an automatic recorder earns its keep most clearly: it is on for every trip, so there is nothing to reconstruct.
Whichever situation you are in, the entry per trip looks the same:
ProFaktura fills all of these in by itself: the addresses come from the map, the kilometres from the route you actually drove and the vehicle from your default setting. You only decide business or private.
The recording runs in the background in the app for iPhone and Android. Screen off, app closed, phone in your pocket or in the holder - the trip keeps recording until you press Stop. Tested on both platforms: thirty minutes of driving with a locked phone produced a complete route without a single gap. In the browser version the screen has to stay on, so on the road use the app.
A stop at a client closes one trip and opens the next. The recorder decides "driving" from speed alone, so walking across a car park or a wandering GPS signal during a coffee break does not become a trip. It would rather cut one trip too many than glue two together - merging two parts is a single tap.
After Stop you see the parts of the day with addresses and kilometres. For each part you choose business or private, correct an address, adjust the kilometres, add a note or discard a part. The route is on the map, so you can see the detour you took and why.
Per month, quarter or year you download the log as a PDF (a clean table) or a CSV (opens in Excel). If your accountant works with Exact or e-Boekhouden, ProFaktura sends the documents straight to their mailbox. And if you would rather not send anything at all, you invite your accountant to your administration by e-mail: they get read access, or more if you choose, and pull the log themselves.
The line between business and private is where most logs go wrong. Commuting between home and a fixed workplace, a shopping stop on the way back from a client, the school run before a meeting - each needs a decision, and the decision needs to be made while you still remember the trip. That is the practical reason to classify trips the same day: the app shows you the parts of the day, you tap business or private, done. Trips marked private stay in the overview - the Belastingdienst wants the complete picture - but do not count towards your costs.
If a trip mixes both, for example client visit then supermarket then home, the recorder has usually already cut it at the supermarket stop, so you classify the two halves separately. If it did not, you split it by hand.
Forgot to press Start? Add the trip manually: you type the two addresses and the program calculates the kilometres via the map. Started halfway? Add a manual part for the beginning and merge it with the recorded part. The log stays complete either way.
Kilometres are one of the costs you deduct; the others - tools, software, a laptop, the phone - are in the guide on deductible business expenses in the Netherlands. Both feed into the same quarterly picture, and ProFaktura's Pro plan keeps them next to each other: the mileage log, expenses with a receipt scanner, hours and a VAT dashboard for the btw-aangifte. If you also need to prove your hours for the urencriterium, the same app keeps that record too.
Yes, in the ProFaktura app for iPhone and Android. The recording runs in the background: the phone can be locked in your pocket and the app can be closed. The trip ends only when you press Stop. In the browser the screen has to stay on, so use the app on the road.
For an entrepreneur using a private car the amount in 2026 is €0.23 per business kilometre, and it covers all car costs: fuel, parking, tolls, maintenance. ProFaktura uses €0.23 by default; you can change the rate per vehicle. Check belastingdienst.nl for the current figure.
Per trip: the date, the start and end address, the number of kilometres, whether the trip was business or private, and which vehicle you used. If you took a detour, the route actually driven belongs in the record too. ProFaktura fills those fields automatically from the recorded route.
With a company car, yes: the 500 kilometre limit only holds up if your log is complete, and that means private trips as well. With a private car you mark them as private; they stay in the overview but do not count as costs.
Yes. Before saving you can adjust kilometres and addresses, merge two parts of a trip, delete a part or add a trip by hand. After saving, trips can still be edited in the Trips tab and the route is shown on a map.
Read next: deductible business expenses · VAT return step by step · the 1225-hours criterion