A hand-kept trip log loses money

Forgotten trips, hours spent writing and tax exposure — the usual price of a trip log (sõidupäevik) kept in a notebook or a spreadsheet. Below is an estimate for Estonia from open sources: move the sliders to your own case.

The price of a hand-kept trip log

estimate, not a measurement
≈ €300–600 and 11–22 h a year

roughly what one driver loses in a year by keeping the trip log by hand

Unrecorded kilometres
€300–600 a year
5–10% of business kilometres never reach a log filled in from memory: short runs, stops along the way, “I'll write it down later”. That is 600–1,200 km a year at €0.50 per kilometre.
Time spent writing
11–22 h a year
≈ €150–300 at the average hourly wage (€13.82 an hour). The law asks for the odometer reading at the start and at the end of every business trip — that is 80 numbers a month typed by hand, plus the date, the purpose and the month-end reconciliation.
1,000 km
40

Move the sliders to your own case — the estimate recalculates.

Tax exposurenot in the total

≈ €275 per month

If no trip records were kept, that month's compensation (€500) counts as salary: 22% income tax and 33% social tax — about €55 on every €100. Not a yearly loss — the price of one month without a log.

How it is calculated and what it rests on

This is a model, not Odoma Tracker statistics. The app's anonymous data cannot tell business kilometres from personal ones, so we cannot measure these losses directly — and we do not pretend to. The range runs from the conservative scenario to the central one; upper scenarios are not shown.

  • Unrecorded kilometres — 5–10% of business mileage. Where trip diaries were checked against GPS, the diary missed 7.4% of trips (Sydney), 10.0% (Kansas City) and about 11% of motorised trips (Melbourne); short trips and stops inside a chain are lost most often, and business trips are the worst-recorded kind. Those were unpaid one-day diaries, not a monthly log someone is paid for — a transfer by analogy, which is why we take the low end.
  • Money — unrecorded kilometres × €0.50/km within the €550 monthly cap per employer (Income Tax Act § 13(3)(2)). Anything above the cap is not counted as a loss.
  • Time — 1–2 minutes per trip and 15–30 minutes a month for reconciliation. This is our assumption: we found no published measurement for trip logs, and we do not use software vendors' figures. The mandatory fields come from § 4 of Regulation No 164: odometer at the start and end of every trip, date and purpose.
  • Value of an hour — €13.82: average gross hourly wage in Estonia, Q2 2026 (Statistics Estonia, table PA112).
  • Tax exposure — per the Tax and Customs Board (EMTA) guidance: compensation paid without trip records is salary. The part above the cap, when a log is kept, is a fringe benefit — about €70.5 of tax on every €100 (22/78 + 33%).

Hand-written figures err in both directions. In the same Sydney study, distances stated from memory were on average 9.7% longer than the measured ones — for an employer, that is overpayment. Summed over all participants the two effects nearly cancelled there (42.8 vs 42.4 km per person per day), but no single driver in a single month can count on that.

What the estimate leaves out

  • Company cars: unless business-only use is proven, the fringe benefit is charged on engine power — about €152 of tax a month for 110 kW.
  • Input VAT on the car: 50% instead of 100% for mixed use.
  • Sole proprietors (FIE): the business share of mileage that scales deductible car costs — no monthly cap, a different mechanism.
  • The accountant's and the employer's time spent collecting and checking paper logs.
  • Fuel: the saving from a calmer driving style — further down this page.

Sources

The estimate is not tax or accounting advice and promises nothing: your result depends on how you keep your log today. Found a flaw in the assumptions? Write to us and we will fix it.

Check it on your own trips

Odoma Tracker is free — no account, no subscription. Drive as usual for a week and compare the app's log with your own.

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