Picture a Tuesday in March, two years from now. You are at your kitchen table with a letter from the IRS. They have questioned the 9,400 business miles you claimed. You know you drove them: the coffee-shop shoots, the location scouts, the trip to meet a brand rep, the hardware-store runs for set pieces. You can see the road. But you have nothing in writing, and your memory is not evidence.

That is the quiet trap in the mileage deduction. Creators are often entitled to a lot of it, and they lose it because they can't prove it.

Why the IRS treats driving differently

Most deductions are forgiving. If you lose a receipt, a reasonable reconstruction can sometimes rescue the expense. Courts have long allowed estimates for some costs under what is called the Cohan rule.

Vehicle expenses are held to a stricter standard. Under Section 274(d) of the Internal Revenue Code, travel and vehicle deductions must be backed by adequate records or by sufficient evidence corroborating your own statement. The estimating latitude that applies to other costs generally doesn't apply here.

In practice, a number you reconstruct at tax time is the weakest evidence you can have. A record you made at the time of the drive is the strongest.

The four facts every entry needs

IRS guidance on substantiating vehicle use comes down to a short list. For each business trip, you need:

  • The date of the trip.
  • The destination, or at least where you went.
  • The business purpose, in plain words.
  • The miles driven.

You also need your total mileage for the year, business and personal combined, so the business share can be shown as a percentage. The easy way to get this is to photograph your odometer on January 1 and again on December 31.

The business-purpose line is where most people fail. "Shoot" is thin. "Filmed sunrise B-roll at the harbor for the March travel video" is a record a stranger can understand years later. You don't need prose. You need enough that the trip makes sense without you in the room.

Which drives actually count

This is where creators overclaim, so it helps to be precise.

Commuting is not deductible. Driving from your home to a regular workplace is a personal expense, and that rule is old and firm. What gets interesting is that many creators work from home.

If your home qualifies as your principal place of business, trips from home to other business locations can be deductible. That includes a client's office, a shoot location, or a meeting with a collaborator. Whether your home qualifies is the same question the home-office rules answer, which means the two deductions are linked. If your studio fails the exclusive-use test, your mileage position gets harder to defend too.

A few examples:

  • Driving to a rented studio you use as your regular workplace is generally commuting.
  • Driving from your home office to a one-off location shoot is typically business travel.
  • Driving to buy props, supplies, or equipment for a specific piece of content is business travel.
  • Stopping at a shoot on the way to dinner is a mixed trip. Only the business portion counts, and you should log it that way.

If you are unsure how a trip is classified, log it with a clear note and ask a tax professional before you claim it. The log keeps the evidence either way.

Standard rate or actual expenses

There are two ways to turn miles into a deduction.

The standard mileage rate is a per-mile figure the IRS sets and announces each year. You multiply your business miles by it. The rate is meant to cover gas, wear, depreciation, and similar running costs, so you don't separately deduct those.

The actual expense method adds up what the vehicle really cost, such as fuel, insurance, repairs, and depreciation, then deducts the business-use percentage. It means more records and more math, and it can come out higher for an expensive vehicle driven a lot.

The choice has a timing rule worth knowing before your first year. Generally, if you use the standard rate in the first year you use a car for business, you keep the option to switch methods later. If you start with the actual method and take certain accelerated depreciation, you may be locked out of the standard rate for that car. Check the current IRS rules or ask a preparer before you pick.

The mileage log is required either way. The actual method adds receipts on top of it.

Why a log you keep as you go beats a log you rebuild

There is a psychological reason this deduction slips away, and it is not laziness. Each drive feels too small to record. Eleven miles to a scout, nine back, a detour for a lens cap. Logging it feels like administrative theater, so you put it off and promise to reconstruct it from your calendar.

Reconstruction is possible, and calendars and photo timestamps can help corroborate it. But it is slower and shakier than recording as you go. The IRS's phrase is a record made at or near the time of the trip, and that is the version that holds up.

The fix is to lower the cost of each entry until it is smaller than your resistance to making it.

Your next moves

These all fit in an afternoon:

  • Photograph your odometer today. Note the date. If it's late in the year, do it anyway and estimate the January reading from an oil-change invoice or a service record with a mileage entry.
  • Write your standard entry template. Use four fields: date, destination, business purpose, miles. Put it in your phone's notes app or a simple spreadsheet with those four column headers.
  • Backfill this year from corroborating evidence. Go through your calendar, email confirmations, and photo timestamps for shoots and meetings. Add each trip with a note on what supports it. Label these as reconstructed. That is more honest, and more credible, than pretending they were logged live.
  • Decide your commute line. Write one sentence defining which of your regular drives are personal. Then you won't relitigate it every time.
  • Set a weekly two-minute habit. Pick a fixed day, such as Sunday evening, and log the week's trips while you can still remember the purpose of each.

This is general information, not tax advice. Rules and the annual rate change, so confirm the current year's details with the IRS or a qualified preparer.

What this has to do with Aside

The common thread in creator taxes is that the deduction exists, but the proof lives in the moment. Aside is built around that gap. It helps creators capture the small business facts, like a drive, a receipt, or a purpose, while they are still fresh, so tax season is a matter of collecting what's already there instead of rebuilding a year from memory. If that sounds like the habit you want, you can take a look at Aside. The four-line log works on a napkin first, though.