Vehicle route sheet (подорожній лист) in Ukraine: is it required and how to fill it in

The подорожній лист, the daily route sheet for a company vehicle, is still how most Ukrainian fleets account for mileage and fuel. It is also surrounded by outdated advice. This guide sets out where it stands legally in 2026, what it has to contain, and how to fill it in, field by field.

Is it mandatory?

No. The obligation was removed by Law No. 3565-VI of 05.07.2011, and the two typical forms (No. 3 for a company car and No. 2-ТН for a truck) were withdrawn at the end of 2013. Nothing replaced them. What remains is the practical need: when fuel is written off, the company has to show that the vehicle actually made the trips, and the route sheet is still the most common evidence for that.

So a company decides for itself whether to keep one, and in what form. If it does, the form is approved in the accounting policy order, and from then on it is a primary document like any other.

In practice the order should settle four things: the blank itself as an annex, who issues the sheet to the driver and takes it back after the shift, who checks the odometer and fuel figures, and where completed sheets are kept. Then an inspector's question has one answer instead of three.

What it must contain to count

A self-designed form is a valid primary document when it carries the details required by article 9 of the Law on Accounting and Financial Reporting:

• the name of the document and its date;
• the name of the company;
• the content and scale of the operation: route, distance, fuel;
• units of measure: kilometres, litres;
• positions and signatures of the people responsible.

Filling it in, field by field

1. Header: company, its code, department, sheet number and date.
2. Vehicle and driver: make and model, registration plate, fleet number, driver's full name and licence number.
3. Odometer: the reading at departure and on return. The day's distance is the difference, never a separate guess.
4. Fuel: in the tank at departure, refuelled during the day, left on return. Consumption is derived from those three.
5. Trips: one line per trip with time out and in, from, to, purpose and distance.
6. Signatures: the driver, the person who released the vehicle (mechanic or dispatcher), and the manager.

A ready blank with exactly these blocks, in Excel and as a print-ready PDF, is free on the route sheet template page. Adapt it to your own procedure before approving it.

What about fuel consumption norms?

For years companies wrote fuel off against the Ministry of Transport Norms No. 43 of 10.02.1998. Those norms were cancelled by Ministry of Infrastructure order No. 1011 of 02.11.2023, and no new national norms have been approved since. In practice a company sets its own consumption rates per vehicle, approves them internally, and compares the route sheets against them. The more useful comparison, once there is a few months of data, is each vehicle against its own history rather than against a figure from a table.

The mistakes that cost the most

• Odometer gaps. Each day should start where the previous one ended. A gap is a trip nobody wrote down.
• Filled in at the end of the week. A sheet completed from memory is an estimate, and it reads like one.
• Distance typed instead of calculated. If the distance does not match the two odometer readings, the sheet contradicts itself.
• No refuelling odometer. Without the reading at the pump, consumption cannot be checked at all.

When the paper becomes the bottleneck

Paper works for one car. With ten, somebody spends days every month deciphering handwriting and retyping it into a spreadsheet, and the checks above are done rarely or not at all. Depot 17 moves the same sheet onto the driver's phone: trips, odometer and refuelling are entered on the spot, even with no signal, and the checks run on every entry. The month ends with the reports already built. More on what it records.

Sources: Law of Ukraine No. 3565-VI of 05.07.2011; Law on Accounting and Financial Reporting in Ukraine, article 9; Ministry of Infrastructure order No. 1011 of 02.11.2023. This article is a practical summary, not legal or tax advice.