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Sweden asks for two odometer readings and audits you on nine fields

The gap between what is required and what is checked

Sweden is the country where reading only the mandatory list gets you into trouble, because the mandatory list is almost nothing.

What Skatteverket says you ska do: record the odometer reading at the start of the year and at the end of the year.

That is the entire hard requirement.

What Skatteverket says you bör do is a different document:

• Registration number
• The year
• Date and odometer at the start and end of each trip
• Kilometres per trip
• Start and end address
• The purpose of the trip
• The places, companies or contacts visited — not needed for private trips
• Notes on driver and refuelling

Why the soft list is the real one

Formally, failing the bör-list costs you little. Practically, the bör-list is exactly what an audit asks for, and a körjournal that cannot answer it loses the case — not because a rule was broken but because the burden of showing how the car was used sits with you and the journal was the instrument for discharging it.

So the honest reading of the Swedish position is: the law asks for two numbers, and the tax authority's own guidance tells you what it will actually want to see. The second list is the one to keep.

Form, and the seven years

Paper, computer or electronic are all accepted, and an automatic electronic system is explicitly fine provided it holds the same data points. The journal is retained seven years under bokföringslagen — which is longer than most people's memory of which software they were using at the time, and a reason to keep exports rather than only an account.

Why an app rather than a notebook

Nothing above requires software; a notebook with those fields is fine, and Skatteverket says so. What software changes is which half survives. The two mandatory readings are easy to remember once a year. The nine-field list is not something anyone reconstructs in March.

DriveHub records each trip in the background — date, both endpoints, distance, route and times — and asks afterwards which were business. It stores odometer readings and prints an odometer-versus-recorded reconciliation for the period, which covers the year-boundary requirement.

Two items from the bör-list it does not carry: the per-trip odometer, and the contact or company visited as a field of its own.

This page states what Skatteverket's own guidance says, and links it so you can check. It is not tax advice and does not know your situation. Where money is involved, ask your revisor — and bring the journal.