It's one of the most common misunderstandings: a sole trader assumes that driving their own car on business earns the same €0.50/km that employees talk about. It doesn't. And the reason isn't a bureaucratic technicality — it's simple logic.
Why there's no reimbursement
The tax-free personal-car reimbursementis a payment an employer makes to an employee. A sole trader (FIE) is neither their own employer nor their own employee — they're a person doing business under their own name. Paying the reimbursement would need two parties, and for a FIE that second party doesn't exist. That's why sole traders are explicitly among those who don't qualify.
What a FIE does instead
That doesn't mean the car slips past your taxes. A FIE deducts business-related car costs — fuel, maintenance, insurance — from business income. The catch is in «business-related»: you can only deduct the share that corresponds to actual work trips, not the grocery run or the drive to the pool with the kids.
And here the logbook plays a different role than for an employee. For an employee it sets the amount of the reimbursement. For a FIE it sets the split— how much of the car's running costs may count as a business expense at all.
The logbook as evidence, not paperwork
Without a logbook you have nothing to show that half the fuel bill was work and half wasn't. The MTA isn't obliged to take your word for it and can reject the whole deduction. A proper logbook is exactly the document that heads off that argument. The fields are the same as any logbook, listed in the guide.
Because the tax treatment depends on your specifics — VAT status, how the car is owned, and so on — run the numbers past an accountant or the MTA. But you have to keep the records either way, and that part DrivLog does for you automatically.