Will Form 8655 Mileage 2024

Welcome to another edition of Tuesday tidbits, where we make tax and accounting simple. I'm your host, Charles D Shapero, CPA, with Widget Bookkeeping and Tax. Today, we're going to talk about what goes in your mileage log in order to prove your deduction to the IRS. We have to be able to show the IRS a log of your business miles. What we can't prove, we lose. So, in a business mileage log, it needs to have several columns. The one that I recommend is a date column. It also needs a destination column to let the IRS know where you went. Additionally, it should have a business purpose column, so that we can tell the IRS why we incurred this business expense. This is very important because deductions are not deductions until we can prove they had a business purpose. There's also a column for total miles and a column for expenses. So, if we are paying tolls as we're driving to places, we can make notes in the mileage log. Now, we've talked previously about how we should never pay cash for expenses. A lot of people pay cash for tolls. If you're doing that, you're going to need to keep the receipt you get from the Tollbooth and write the business purpose right on that receipt. What we'd recommend is to sign up with your state's toll provider. For example, in Florida, it's called Sun Pass. It's a little transponder that we put on our car that tracks our tolls as we go through the toll booths. So, at the end of every month, we can download the amount of toll expenses we have and we can expense the business ones and we can ignore the personal ones. Your mileage log is the only way to...