Electricity is the cost EV owners talk about, because it is the one that changed. But it is rarely the one that dominates. Tyres, servicing, the MOT, insurance, road tax, a brake job — these carry on regardless of what is under the bonnet, and if they are missing from your records, your “cost per mile” is really just your electricity bill wearing a grander name. Amperlo’s maintenance ledger exists to close that gap: one place for every cost of ownership that is not a charge.
Seven categories, one ledger
The ledger organises entries into seven categories: services, tyres, brakes, MOT, insurance, VED (road tax), and warranty. Each entry records what was done, when, and what it cost — and the categories are not just labels for tidiness. They drive how each entry is treated for tax, and they let the Costs page split your year into a meaningful shape rather than one undifferentiated “other” pile.
Adding an entry by hand takes moments: pick the category, enter the date and amounts, done. But the more interesting route is the one that involves no typing at all.
Send the invoice, skip the typing
If you are on the paid plan you already know the receipt flow for charging: photograph or upload a receipt and our AI reads it into a draft for review. The maintenance ledger uses exactly the same pipeline for garage invoices, insurance schedules, tyre receipts and MOT paperwork.
Upload the PDF your garage emailed you and the AI extracts the supplier, the date, the amounts and the VAT breakdown, and drops the result into a draft maintenance entry. You review it, correct anything that needs correcting, and confirm. A stack of paperwork in a glovebox becomes a categorised, dated, VAT-split ledger with a few taps per document — and the original document stays attached to the entry, so the evidence lives with the number.
VAT handling that knows what it’s looking at
Here is a detail most tracking tools get wrong: not everything you pay for a car carries VAT, and pretending otherwise corrupts your records in ways an accountant will notice.
- Insurance does not carry VAT at all. What appears on the schedule is Insurance Premium Tax (IPT), a different tax that is not reclaimable as VAT. Amperlo knows this and does not invent a VAT split for insurance entries.
- VED is a government fee, not a VATable supply. There is no VAT to extract, so none is extracted.
- Warranty products are frequently taxed in non-standard ways, so Amperlo declines to guess there too.
- Standard garage work — services, tyres, brakes, the MOT-adjacent repairs — carries normal VAT, and those entries store the ex-VAT amount, the VAT, and the inc-VAT total as separate figures, exactly as charging sessions do.
For the standard-rated categories there is a further safeguard. When the AI reads an invoice, Amperlo checks that the extracted ex-VAT, VAT, and total actually agree with each other and imply a plausible VAT rate. If the arithmetic doesn’t hold — a smudged scan, a misread digit — the suspect split is discarded and recomputed from the total rather than being stored broken. The category-aware exceptions above are deliberately excluded from that recomputation: recalculating “VAT” on an insurance premium would manufacture a reclaim that does not exist.
Where the numbers flow
The ledger is not a filing cabinet; it feeds the app’s cost views directly. Amperlo’s Dashboard offers three cost-per-mile modes, and the maintenance ledger is precisely the difference between the first two. Energy mode is electricity alone — the flattering number. Running mode adds everything in the ledger: now the tyres, the service, the insurance and the road tax are spread across your miles, and the figure starts to resemble what the car genuinely costs to operate. TCO mode goes further still, adding depreciation or finance costs on top.
The Costs page draws on the same data for the year view: your spend split across energy, maintenance and depreciation, so you can see at a glance which of the three is actually driving the total. It is common for the answer to surprise people — a single tyre bill can outweigh a month of charging, and seeing that plainly is the point.
None of these figures are stored totals that can drift out of date. Every number on the Dashboard and the Costs page is recomputed from the underlying entries, so if you correct a misread invoice or recategorise an entry next month, every derived figure — the running cost per mile, the year’s maintenance share, the TCO — updates to match. Your ledger is the single source of truth, and the reports are simply views of it.
Honesty is the feature
Amperlo’s premise is honest numbers, and the maintenance ledger is where honesty is won or lost. A cost-per-mile figure that omits maintenance is not conservative, it is fiction — and it is precisely the fiction that EV-versus-petrol arguments tend to be built on. Recording the boring costs is what earns you the right to trust the exciting comparisons: when your running-cost figure includes the tyres and the insurance, it will survive contact with a sceptic.
It also makes the comparison with petrol fair in the other direction. Your old petrol car had tyres, an MOT, insurance and road tax too; if you only ever compare electricity against petrol, you are comparing part of one car against part of another. With the ledger populated, Amperlo can put whole-car numbers side by side — which is the only comparison worth making.
The maintenance ledger is part of Amperlo’s paid plan (£4.99/mo), alongside AI receipt parsing, email intake, and Trips, covering up to three vehicles. The free tier covers a single vehicle’s charging, mileage and savings tracking end to end.
If your glovebox contains a folded stack of garage paperwork, that stack is a running-cost history waiting to be read. Sign up at amperlo.com, feed it through, and find out what your car really costs per mile.
