How to add travel time and km to a Xero invoice

Blog10 November 2026

Travel is easy to lose on an invoice. If it is not a line of its own, it either gets folded into your hourly rate or dropped. Two separate lines, one for travel time and one for kilometres, make it visible and easy to explain to a client.

Get the numbers first

For each job you need hours on site, travel time and distance. Without a record, you are guessing from memory or a map. A log from your phone, or a notebook kept as you go, is better than either.

Set up two items in Xero

1. In Xero, go to Business, then Products and services, and add a new item.
2. Create one called Travel time, with your hourly travel rate as the sales price and the sales account you use for labour.
3. Create a second called Vehicle km, with your per-kilometre rate as the sales price.
4. Check the tax setting on each. If you are unsure how travel should be taxed, ask your accountant.

Your travel rate does not have to match your labour rate. Some people charge less for time in the van. That is your call and worth stating in your quote.

A worked example

Say a day on one job gives you 47 minutes of travel and 29.3 km. Xero wants hours as a decimal, so 47 minutes is 0.78 hours. With example rates of 90 an hour and 0.95 a kilometre, the lines look like this:

Put the date and the site in the description. Clients question a line they cannot place, and a specific description answers the question before they ask it.

Tips that save an argument

Agree on travel charges before the job, not after the invoice. Keep one rule for how you round and use it every time. If you bill several jobs in one trip, say how you share the drive between them.

Getting the totals

Tarry records time on each site, plus the travel time and kilometres between sites, so the numbers for those two lines are already worked out when you sit down to invoice. Try the travel lines calculator.