Trip Logbook
Translating Tax Compliance Into a Usable Product
Lead product designer
(End-to-end)
Tax & Assets Compliance, Legal & Privacy, EMEA solutions
May 2026 → Aug 2026
$3M ARR retained
~1500 EU accounts (Projected)
Overview
Designing under audit
Trip Logbook is Geotab's replacement for the trip-registration experience used by Dutch fleets. To move customers off the legacy platform without losing the required certifications, the new experience had to satisfy 100+ audit requirements, protect private trip data, and work across web and mobile. I led the design from mapping the requirements to the shipped product.
Problem
Dutch fleets moving off their legacy platform needed a certified replacement since a trip register in the Netherlands serves as legal tax evidence. Underneath that business case I found the real design problem that our users rely on the same record but they each need it for a different purpose.
Research
What qualifies as certified?
01 Scorecarding
Setting the certification baseline
I started by mapping where each provider stood across the Dutch and German markets.
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Claude-code Geotab Anthropic
~/trip-logbook The prompt I used
Review the current Driver Logbook experience alongside the certification requirements. Map the existing workflows, product limitations, and known gaps. Separate what is already supported from what requires redesign or a new capability.
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Output:
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Key insights
WebFleet is the only competitor that handles both markets natively. This gave us a useful benchmark for what a broader EU solution would need to support.
Strategy
The immediate priority was supporting customers moving from the existing platform. Longer term, the product needed to scale across additional EU markets.
02 Main themes
What customers need from a certified logbook
Then I looked at why customers buy certified logbooks in the first place. It gave me these 4 patterns which became the product principles.
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Claude-code Geotab Anthropic
~/trip-logbook The prompt I used
Compare how certified trip-logbook products handle classification, privacy, editing, manual entry, and audit export. Focus on recurring UX patterns and user expectations rather than copying interfaces.
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Output:
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03 Auditing
Auditing our existing system
Geotab already had an add-in with tax-agency certification, so before designing anything new I audited its 13 components to separate what to keep from what to rebuild. As a result, I found that the existing add-in was driver facing only, being phased out, and short of the Dutch requirements.
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Claude-code Geotab Anthropic
~/trip-logbook The prompt I used
Evaluate each part of the current Driver Logbook add-in by user, purpose, interaction pattern, and technical constraint. Classify each capability as: retain, improve, retire, or build new. Explain the rationale using the requirements and current product behaviour.
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Output:
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Component
Status
Trip categorization workflow
Deprecate
Three category types
Keep
Add-in architecture
Deprecate
Trip detail edibility
Fix
7-day revision logging
Fix
Trip categorization report
Fix
Component
Status
Driver-only interface
Build new
Private trip GPS masking
Build new
XAR audit file export
Build new
Mixed-nature trip splitting
Build new
Manual trip entry
Build new
Exception view for unclassified trips
Build new
Configurable regional rules
Build new
Decisions
How requirements shaped the product
Field research changed the direction of the product. Instead of designing around an assumed driver workflow, I used the evidence to redefine who the MVP was primarily for, what had to stay in scope, and where privacy needed to be solved.
EARLY DIRECTION
Driver-led classification
Drivers would primarily use the mobile app to review and classify their trips.
MVP scope
Manual trip entry and mixed-trip splitting were initially planned for a later phase.
V1
Later
Privacy approach
Private-trip GPS would be hidden within the new Trip Logbook experience.
REVISED MVP
Admin-first web
Drivers would primarily use the mobile app to review and classify their trips.
Certification actions included
Manual entry and mixed-trip handling stayed in scope
Manual
Mixed
Audit
Platform-level privacy
Private-trip protection had to follow the data across surfaces
Design
Bringing the certified experience together
The final design brings certification into familiar Geotab workflows, the web experience gives fleet managers one place to review, correct, and export trip records, while driver-facing interactions stay focused on consent, classification, and privacy.
Setting privacy expectations before the first trip
Error prevention without losing history
Making audit export a guided workflow
Tradeoffs
How the scope changed overtime
The scope changed three times: after field research, after the audit-prep session, and after engineering estimates exposed the cost of the platform work. Each change forced us to separate what certification truly required from what could wait.
