As a self-employed driver one of your biggest tax deductions will relate to your vehicle.

You can choose to claim actual costs (depreciation, insurance, fuel, maintenance etc) or use the IRD mileage rates.

For most rideshare and food delivery drivers using efficient and affordable cars, the mileage rates will give a much better result for tax.  If you choose to use a more expensive or inefficient car the actual costs will most likely be the way to go.

 Either way, you will need to know how many KM you have driven in the tax year and what percentage of those KM were for business.

Gravy, an NZTA approved logbook have kindly offered our clients 3 months free (use code: Threegravymonths)

See their website for more info and app download:

https://www.gravy.insure/

 Simply enter your odometer reading at the start and end of each work shift and everything we need will be available to us as your tax agent. Rideshare drivers are legally required to record working time hours so using Gravy (NZTA approved) will meet this requirement as well!

Delivery drivers have less stringent rules but we would also recommend they use a logbook for mileage recording and most importantly – LESS TAX.

Gravy only costs $7.99 per month (after free trial period)

Gravy also have some exciting things coming soon for insurance (They calculate how many hours you are driving for your business and enable you to pay only for the commercial insurance you need).

 Note: IRD also allows a logbook to be kept for three months every three years to work out business percentage. But this is not valid if there is a change in usage of 20% or more. See IRD rules here and an old style logbook example. IRD Logbook info