Mileage: reimbursing your technicians, billing your clients — or both

For a service business, the road is an invisible cost centre. Between reimbursing technicians who use their personal vehicles and unbilled travel time, many companies lose hundreds of dollars a week without seeing it.

Reimbursing the employee

The CRA publishes an annual per-kilometre rate deemed reasonable (check the current year's rate — it moves). Reimburse at that rate or less: non-taxable for the employee, deductible for you. Reimburse more: the excess becomes a taxable benefit.

The real problem isn't the rate, it's the measurement. Paper logbooks are systematically rounded up (rarely maliciously — by estimation). Across 4 technicians, 10 inflated km per day is over $7,000 a year.

The three sources of truth

• GPS trace: the distance actually driven, captured automatically during the declared trip.
• Odometer: the fallback for claims without GPS.
• Computed route distance: the sanity check — if a claim exceeds the route by more than 25%, it deserves a look.

MainteQC captures all three and flags deviations, with an approval queue for claims above your threshold.

Billing the client?

Three possible policies, all legitimate depending on your market: absorb (included in the hourly rate), flat travel fee per visit, or per-kilometre pass-through (with or without markup). What matters is transparency: a clear "Travel" line on the invoice lands better than a quietly inflated hourly rate.

In MainteQC, the policy is set once (default or per client) and the line generates automatically. Payroll, meanwhile, computes reimbursement per pay period with no re-entry. Details on the features page.