The Mileage Deduction Most Resellers Never Claim

Ask a room of booth vendors what their biggest business expense is and most will say booth rent. For a lot of them the honest answer is driving — they just have no record of it. Mileage is the deduction resellers lose most often, and it is lost for a boring reason: there is no receipt to remind you it happened.

Why it disappears

Every other expense leaves evidence. You have a card charge for the bubble wrap and a check stub for the rent. Driving leaves nothing. You go to three sales on a Saturday, cover sixty miles, and by Tuesday the trip is gone from memory entirely.

Multiply a typical sourcing Saturday by most of a year and the total is rarely small. For many local resellers, driving is either the largest or the second-largest business cost they have. Claiming none of it is the most expensive habit in the trade.

What counts as business driving

Broadly, driving for the work counts:

• Estate sales, yard sales, auctions, thrift stores, and flea markets you source from
• Trips to your booth to restock, re-tag, rearrange, or collect a check
• The post office or shipping store for orders
• Picking up supplies — bins, tags, packing material
• Driving to look at something you were called about, whether or not you bought it

That last one matters more than people expect. A trip that ended in nothing is still a business trip. Sourcing has a hit rate well under 100%, and the misses are part of the cost of the hits.

Personal driving does not count, and combining errands does not make the personal half deductible. If you hit two sales and then the grocery store, the grocery leg is yours.

Two ways to claim it

There are generally two methods. One is a standard rate multiplied by your business miles. The other is tracking the actual costs of operating the vehicle — gas, insurance, repairs, depreciation — and claiming the business-use percentage of them.

The standard rate is far simpler and is what most resellers use, because it needs one number per trip instead of a year of vehicle receipts. Actual costs can come out ahead for an expensive or heavily used vehicle. The rate changes every year, and there are rules about switching methods, so this is worth one conversation with a preparer rather than a guess.

What a log needs

A mileage record that holds up is not complicated, but it does need to be contemporaneous — kept at the time, not reconstructed later. For each trip:

• The date.
• The miles. Odometer readings are the gold standard; a reliable mileage figure is the working minimum.
• Where and why. “Estate sale, Mill St” is enough. It has to identify the trip as business.

Record the rate you used on each trip, too. Rates change annually, and if all you keep is a dollar total you will not be able to reproduce how you got there — or restate a year cleanly if you need to.

The mistakes that cost the most

• Reconstructing in April. A log written from memory before filing is weak, and it is always an undercount — you will remember the big Saturdays and forget twenty short runs to the booth.
• Only logging successful trips. The sales you left empty-handed count too.
• Forgetting the booth itself. Restocking runs are short, frequent, and add up to more than any single sourcing trip.
• Claiming a round number. An unsupported estimate is the weakest thing you can put on a return.
• Double-claiming. If you take the standard rate, you generally cannot also deduct gas and repairs for the same vehicle. Pick a method.

Make it a thirty-second habit

The only mileage system that works is one you can complete before you take your coat off. Miles, where you went, done. If it takes longer than that you will skip it on the day you are tired, and the days you are tired are the days you drove the furthest.

Sellers who start logging trips are routinely surprised by the annual total. Not because they drove more than they thought, but because they had never added it up at all.

General information, not tax advice. Mileage rules, rates, and record-keeping requirements change and vary by country — confirm the specifics with a tax professional.