DriveHub

Poland has two vehicle registers, they are not interchangeable, and one of them halves your VAT

Two registers, and picking the wrong one is not a formality

Polish guidance about ewidencja przebiegu pojazdu describes two different documents under almost the same name, and a lot of it does not say which one it means.

For a car used partly privately, the one that decides real money is the VAT register: art. 86a ust. 7 ustawy o VAT, kept so that input VAT can be deducted at 100% rather than 50%, and filed alongside a VAT-26 notification.

If you are keeping a careful record aimed at income tax and expecting it to serve for VAT as well, check which list you are working from before the settlement period ends rather than after.

What the VAT register must contain

• The registration number of the vehicle
• The date the register was opened and the date it was closed
• The odometer reading at opening, at the end of every settlement period, and at closing
• The total number of kilometres driven
• And per use of the vehicle, an entry by the driver: the date, the purpose, a description of the route (from where, to where), the number of kilometres, and who was driving

Where the driver is not the taxpayer, the taxpayer countersigns at the end of each period.

The counter reading at the end of each period

This is the requirement that gets missed, because it is not a per-trip field and not a per-year field. It is a reading you have to take at the close of every settlement period — monthly or quarterly, depending on how you settle. A register with an opening and a closing figure and nothing in between is incomplete on its face, and it is incomplete in a way that is impossible to repair later: nobody can reconstruct what the odometer said on 30 September.

What it costs

Input VAT drops from 100% to 50%. On a vehicle and its running costs, over a year, that is not a rounding error.

Why an app rather than a notebook

Nothing above requires software; a paper register with those columns satisfies the article. What software changes is the failure mode. What goes missing is never the kilometres — it is the route description for a trip three months ago, the exact date, and the period-end counter that had to be read on a specific day.

DriveHub records each trip in the background with both endpoints, the route and the times, and asks afterwards which were business.

What it does not yet carry: the per-trip odometer and the period-end counter, the plate on the row, and the driver's identity as a field. Those are the parts of art. 86a ust. 7 you will still be filling in yourself.

This page states what the article itself requires and names it so you can check. It is not tax advice and does not know your situation. Where money is involved, ask your księgowy — and bring the register.