Records foundations
Mileage, workspace, assets: the records that are easy to forget
Three record types that quietly go missing all year — and lightweight habits that keep each one from becoming an April reconstruction.
Educational only — this is general record-organization guidance, not tax advice. It describes habits for keeping records, not rules about how anything is taxed. Your accountant or tax advisor confirms what applies to your situation.
Most expenses announce themselves — a receipt lands in your hand and you file it. Three important record types don’t work that way. Mileage, workspace costs, and capital assets tend to accumulate silently and then have to be reconstructed from memory at year-end. A few small habits keep them current instead.
Why these three go missing
Each of these is a record you have to choose to create — nobody hands you a receipt for the fourteen kilometres you drove to a client, the corner of your home you work from, or the fact that today’s laptop is different from today’s box of pens. Because there is no prompt, they slip. And because they slip all year, rebuilding them in April is slow and error-prone.
Mileage: log it as you drive
A business mileage record is a trip-by-trip log, not a single number you estimate later. The strongest logs are kept in the moment:
- The date and purpose of the trip
- Where you went, and roughly the distance
- That it was business driving, not personal
This is a kilometre-and-purpose record you keep — not live location tracking, and not a dollar figure. What the log is ultimately worth is worked out with your accountant; your job is to keep the trips honest and current.
Workspace: keep the space and the bills
If you work from home or a dedicated space, two things are easy to lose track of: the details of the space itself, and the bills that stand behind it. Keep those underlying records organized as you go, as a separate schedule rather than folded into everyday expenses.
For accountant review
How a workspace is treated depends on facts your accountant will ask about. Keep the records organized and let them confirm the treatment — this is not the place to compute a final figure yourself.
Capital assets: flag the bigger purchases
Some purchases are used up quickly; others — a computer, tools, a vehicle — keep working for years, and your accountant tracks them differently. You don’t need to know how they are treated. You need to notice, at the time, that a purchase is a bigger, longer-lived one and record it as such:
- What you bought and when
- What it cost
- That it is a lasting asset, not an everyday expense
ExpenIQ keeps a capital-asset record with the context your accountant needs — but it does not compute depreciation or capital cost allowance. Those are your accountant’s to determine.
The habit that keeps all three current
- Log a business trip the day you take it
- File workspace bills the month they arrive
- Record a big purchase as an asset at the moment you make it
- In your monthly review, check that none of the three quietly went missing
None of these habits decides a tax outcome — they just make sure the underlying records exist and are organized when your accountant reviews them. The easiest records to forget are the ones worth building a small habit around.
This guide is for organizational purposes only and is not tax advice. Final treatment of any record depends on your facts and your accountant or tax advisor's judgment.