DriveTax Express BAS
Lodge your BAS with the Rideshare Tax Experts
Before You Start
If you’d like to learn more about Uber BAS’s before you begin, head to our Ultimate Guide to BAS’s for Uber Drivers. We explain how the GST calculation works, what you can claim, what records you need to keep, and the ATO’s requirements for paying your GST bill.
Pre-BAS Checklist
ABN – you must be registered for GST in order to lodge a BAS. If you’re not already registered you can do so for free here.
Monthly Tax Summaries – for Uber, DiDi, Ola the correct report that we need is called the Tax Summary. For Shebah it is called an Income Summary. Please don’t send invoices, weekly statements, or any other reports.
Totals of any other income – if you had any other kind of income, please add up your total received for the quarter
Expenses totalled by category – scroll down to see the categories. Car expenses should include Uber + private use. All figures must be inclusive of GST.
FAQ’s
When lodging with DriveTax your BAS is due on the 25th of the second month after the end of the quarter. So for example the June BAS is due in the 25th of August. If this falls on a weekend the due date is the next business day. You must submit your Express BAS form to us three business days prior to the deadline to guarantee on-time lodgment.
Our standard processing time is two business days. You must submit your Express BAS form to us three business days prior to the deadline to guarantee on-time lodgment.
Once you’re registered for GST you must lodge a BAS every quarter or face fines and penalties. This is true even if you have only driven a little, or not at all.
If you haven’t driven at all during the quarter, you can easily advise the ATO of a Nil BAS by clicking on the BAS in your MyGov.
If you don’t plan to drive in the future you may like to consider de-registering for GST so that you don’t need to lodge any more BAS’s in future.
We cannot prepare your BAS without these. Sometimes they can take a while after the end of the month to become available, so you will need to wait for these before submitting your Express BAS.
No, the bookkeeping spreadsheet is completely optional. It can be handy if you like to be very systemised in your recordkeeping, but just manually adding up your receipts into totals at the end of the quarter is equally fine.
For GST purposes, if you haven’t done a logbook the ATO allows you to make a reasonable estimate of your Uber percentage based on records such as odometer readings or service records.
Note that there are different rules for income tax. For your end-of-year tax return, if you haven’t kept a formal logbook, you’ll be limited to a maximum claim of 5,000kms at 72 cents per km, giving a deduction of $3,600. For infrequent drivers this may be plenty, but if you drive greater hours for Uber a logbook may be well worth the trouble. Read more about keeping a logbook here.
No, you don’t need to send your receipts to us, you just need to store them in a safe place at home in case the ATO requests them. You must have a formal Tax Invoice for any expenses over $82.50. For expenses under this amount you must have some kind of written evidence, which can be a tax invoice, cash register docket or receipt.
The ATO understands that for some cash expenses such as coin carwashes you may not get a receipt. In this case you just need to make a note of the date, the name of the store/carwash and the amount. We suggest keeping a pen and notebook in your glovebox for this purpose.
Visit our blog post on Claiming an EV or Tesla on your Uber Taxes for detail on how to calculate your electricity deduction.
Uber show your toll expense on your monthly summaries, but this is only the tolls while you had passengers. You may have also had some tolls in between trips that are also tax deductible.
You have two options to claim your tolls in the Express BAS form.
- Refer to your tolls statements, add up the tolls from ridesharing (both with passengers and between passengers), and enter these in the tolls box below
- Leave the tolls box blank, and we will just use the ‘with passengers’ tolls figure from your Uber summaries.
This can be confusing because Uber used a lot of data but not many phone calls, so how should you work out the overall percentage of your phone bill? We recommend estimating your percentage based on what percentage of the time you spend actively using your phone (calls, internet, Uber, social media etc) is Uber vs private. This doesn’t have to be exact, a reasonable estimate is fine.
You can still go ahead and submit the Express BAS form. The ATO will generally not fine you for being a few days late or even a few weeks, provided you have a good lodgment history. Fines are usually only applied if you have multiple BAS’s outstanding, or are months overdue, or you have had late BAS’s in the past.
If you’re not able to pay your GST bill up front the ATO are generally happy to set up a payment arrangement for you. You can read more on how to set this up on the ATO website.
If you have two or three BAS’s to lodge, you can submit these via our Express BAS service. You’ll need to fill in the Express BAS form once for each BAS. If you have four or more BAS’s to lodge please contact us via email.