Free car rental Excel template: bookings, fleet, deposits, tolls and fines

What is in the free car rental Excel template

The file is one .xlsx workbook without macros: a Start sheet with a short how-to and six working sheets. You type into the white cells. The grey cells hold formulas and are protected, without a password.

A full rental system also keeps customers, payments, expenses and a cash book as separate records. The template has none of those and no printable invoice. The customer is a name in the booking row, with no columns for a phone or a driving licence number, and a payment is one cell. The last section shows where that stops being enough.

For a rental company outside the UAE, take the general file. The currency in Settings is a label on Summary: the sheets don’t convert amounts. Tax in the general file is off. If you charge one, enter the rate and the name of the tax: the name becomes the heading of the tax column on Bookings. The way to count days is set there too.

The workbook uses no functions that, according to Microsoft’s list of Excel functions, appeared only in Excel 2019 and 2021. It also leaves out DATEDIF, which Microsoft warns “may calculate incorrect results under certain scenarios”, so the file counts days by subtracting dates. We don’t suggest staying on an old Excel: Microsoft ended support for Office 2016 and Office 2019 on 14 October 2025.

We checked the formulas by recalculation in LibreOffice 24.2. We have not tested the file in desktop Excel or Google Sheets.

The file stores formulas without their results: the spreadsheet program calculates them when it opens the file. A preview that doesn’t calculate, for example in a messenger or a mail app, may show the grey columns empty.

To start:

1. Open Settings and set the currency, the tax rate and the way to count days
2. List your cars on the Fleet sheet
3. Clear the white cells of the example rows: they are shaded and say “example” in Notes
4. Enter bookings, then charges as the statements come in

Each sheet has a fixed range of rows with formulas:

Rows below the last one are not checked. The ranges are fixed inside the formulas, so copying a row further down does not extend them. If you need more, turn off sheet protection and widen the ranges in the formulas.

While a sheet is protected, you can filter it by the header row, but you can’t sort it or insert and delete rows. To get rid of a wrong row, clear its white cells.

Car rental booking sheet: how to avoid double bookings in Excel

One row is one booking. A booking and a rental share the row, and the Status column tells them apart. You pick the car from a drop-down list, type the customer’s name, and enter Pickup and Return as a date and a time in one cell each.

A booking holds the car for its dates. A cancelled or returned row holds nothing. The Check column compares each row with the other rows of the same car. Two bookings overlap when one starts no later than the other ends and ends no earlier than the other starts, both ends included. Then both rows say Overlap. In the sheet below, move a date or change the car and watch the Check column.

Check gives three answers: OK, Overlap and Check dates. The third appears when a date is missing, is typed or pasted as text, or the return is earlier than the pickup. On a cancelled or returned row with valid dates the cell stays empty.

Both ends count, so a return at 10:00 and a pickup at 10:00 of the same car are an overlap while both rows hold the car. Once the first rental is marked Returned, it no longer holds the car and the overlap clears. If your cars go out back to back, mark each return as soon as the car is back. Two future bookings that meet at the same time, a return at 10:00 and the next pickup at 10:00, will show Overlap until the first rental is marked Returned, even if that is weeks away. That mark is expected. If it gets in the way, book the next pickup a minute later: at handover you correct Pickup to the real time anyway.

The other sheets read the Status column. It has four values:

The row keeps one pair of dates. The template has no separate columns for planned and actual times, and it does not keep the original return date. To extend a rental, change Return and the Check column recalculates. There are no columns for mileage, fuel or damage at pickup and return either.

Days come from a switch in Settings. You choose 24-hour periods from the pickup time, or calendar dates counted inclusively. The two modes count the same rental differently. A car that goes out at 10:00 and comes back at 10:00 three days later is 3 periods but 4 calendar dates. With 24-hour periods, a period that has started counts as a whole one. Use the mode your rental agreement describes.

The template has no grace period. With 24-hour periods, a car back 20 minutes late is one more day, and Days is a protected formula. If you don’t charge for a short delay, the simplest way is to set Return to the agreed time and write the real time in Notes. Charges made in those minutes will then show No rental, so check them by hand.

The Rental amount is days times the daily rate on the booking row. The rate is without tax, and the tax column adds the rate from Settings on top. All three rates on Fleet, per day, week and month, are for reference only. No formula reads them, so type the daily price you agreed into each booking row, for a long rental too.

The formulas need two things. The booking number is a number and does not repeat, and the sheet highlights a repeat. And among rentals, the rows with status Active or Returned, one car must not have two rows with the same pickup time. If it does, the Dup column writes Duplicate in both rows. The section on charges explains what that would break.

Fleet management in the same Excel spreadsheet

The Fleet sheet has one row per car: plate, make, model, year, colour and VIN, the rate per day, week and month, the dates when insurance and registration run out, the date of the next service, and a manual status for a car that is in repair or parked.

The plates on this sheet feed the drop-down lists on Bookings and Charges. Pick the car from the list instead of typing it. The formulas find a rental only when the plate is written the same way on both sheets. To them BB 69186 and BB69186 are two different cars.

Three dates on Fleet change colour: insurance expiry, registration expiry and the next service. The threshold is a number of days in Settings, 60 in the downloaded file.

Tolls, parking and fines: matching each charge to the right rental

In our experience building rental software in Dubai, tolls, parking charges and fines are issued to the car, not to the renter. Tolls and parking are tied to the plate and the time. Fines from radars can arrive after the car is back. To bill the right customer, someone has to match each charge to a rental.

Each charge is one row on the Charges sheet: when it happened, as a date and a time, the car, the kind (toll, parking, fine or other), the amount, and a name such as the gate, the car park or the violation. The optional Fee column is for an amount you charge on top of the statement: Due from customer adds it to the amount of the charge. It is empty in the downloaded file.

The time of a charge is a date and a time in one cell, for example 2026-10-12 14:30, as in Pickup and Return. If the statement has them in two columns, join them into one cell before you paste: when the date is in column A and the time in column B, =A2+B2 gives one cell; copy the results and paste them as values. Whether a program reads 03.04 as 3 April or 4 March depends on its language settings, so check a couple of rows after you paste a statement. The times in the statement and the pickup times must be in one time zone. A charge time pasted as text gives Check dates in its own row. A date typed as text in Pickup or Return on Bookings gives Check dates in every row of Charges until you retype it.

The Booking column then looks for the rental by five rules.

1. Only rentals of the same car count: rows with status Active or Returned
2. A rental’s window runs from Pickup to Return, both ends included
3. For a car that is still out, the window runs to “now”: the moment the file was last recalculated
4. The formula takes the latest pickup of that car that is not later than the charge, then checks that the charge is not later than that rental’s return
5. A charge outside every window gets No rental and is not the customer’s

Example: a toll at 14:20, and the same car is on rental that day from 10:00 to 18:00. Booking shows the number of that rental.

The file recalculates when it opens. If it has been open for a long time, close it and open it again so that “now” catches up.

Two rental rows for one car with the same pickup time break the match. A formula of this kind would add the two booking numbers and return a number that is not in the sheet. So the Dup column on Bookings marks both rows, and the Booking cell on Charges shows Duplicate until you remove one.

A fine has four more columns:

A fine belongs to a rental by the time of the violation, even when you learn about it later, so the row carries both dates. A fine marked After return could not have been on the bill you settled at return. Some fines are not the customer’s at all: they are issued to the company as the vehicle’s owner. Who pays keeps those out of the customer’s total.

An empty total has two meanings: “we checked and there are no charges” and “nobody has entered the statement yet”. Settings holds a “Statement entered through” date for each kind of charge. Update it with each statement you enter.

Security deposits in Excel

The Deposits sheet has one row per deposit: the booking number, the amount, how you took it (cash, card hold, card payment or transfer), the date you took it, the date and amount you returned, the amount you withheld and the reason.

The sheet works out what you still hold, the deposit minus what you returned and what you withheld. It highlights a row when the rental is Returned and you have held the money longer than the number of days in Settings.

The deposit return period in Settings is empty when you download the file. We don’t suggest a number. Take it from your own rental agreement.

Summary: utilisation and revenue for the month

The Summary sheet opens on the current month. Type any date of another month to see that one.

How the sheet counts

Revenue is not cash received, because the template has no payment dates. A rental counts in full in the month of pickup: 20 days from the 20th go to that month, though some of the days fall in the next one. The sheet also shows the “Statement entered through” dates from Settings, so you can see how fresh the charges are.

Car rental Excel template for the UAE: AED, VAT, Salik, DARB and TARS

The UAE version is the same workbook, set up for a rental company in the Emirates.

VAT. The standard rate is 5% under Federal Decree-Law No. 8 of 2017, in force since 1 January 2018, as the Ministry of Finance states. Registration is mandatory once taxable supplies and imports exceed AED 375,000 over the previous 12 months, or are expected to exceed it in the next 30 days. Voluntary registration starts at AED 187,500. Both thresholds are in the Executive Regulation, consolidated text of September 2026. The rate is a cell in Settings, so a company that is not registered turns the tax off by setting the rate to zero. A registered company types its Tax Registration Number (TRN) into the cell next to it.

Salik and DARB. Both are kinds of charge in the UAE file. Since 1 June 2026, a 5% VAT applies to toll transactions at Dubai’s toll gates, according to the UAE Government portal. So enter a Salik amount as the operator’s statement shows it, and don’t add the tax a second time. How you pass these amounts on to a customer for VAT is a question for your accountant.

TARS. As our guide to RTA TARS describes, Dubai rental offices register their contracts in RTA’s TARS portal. Five columns on Bookings serve that work. Two of them, TARS due and In TARS, exist only in the UAE file.

One number in your records and in TARS makes a contract easy to match. The start time in TARS is the time on the signed contract, so in the UAE file enter that time as Pickup when you mark the rental Active. The 3 hours are the window Dubai rental companies work to in practice; we did not find it as a published RTA rule.

The unified rental contract. In March 2026 RTA said that the unified contract prohibits undisclosed fees, such as additional charges related to passing toll gates, and requires rental offices to refund the security deposit within the specified timeframe. Two cells in the template touch on this. The Fee column on Charges is empty by default, and we don’t suggest a fee. The deposit term in Settings is empty too. The number comes from your contract.

Records. The FTA’s rules on accounting records, in force since 30 July 2026, want records complete, legible and open to the Authority on request, together with the system that stores them and, if the file has a password, the password. We did not study who the decision applies to, so show this paragraph to your accountant.

Car rental invoice: what the template gives and what a UAE tax invoice must show

Show this section to your accountant before you act on it. It retells the rules and is not tax advice.

The template has no printable invoice form. It gives you the figures an invoice needs: the rental amount, the tax, the charges and the deposit.

For an ordinary rental, Article 59 of the Executive Regulation of the VAT Decree-Law, consolidated text of September 2026, sets out what a tax invoice shows. A simplified tax invoice shows less. TRN in the table is the Tax Registration Number.

If you convert the amounts from another currency, the tax invoice also shows the exchange rate.

A simplified tax invoice is allowed when the customer is not registered for VAT, or is registered and the amount does not exceed AED 10,000. The regulation adds two limits: the FTA may still require a full tax invoice, and the simplified form does not apply where the invoice has to be electronic.

You issue a tax invoice within 14 days from the date of supply, and a simplified one on the date of supply. We don’t interpret here what the date of supply is for a rental: ask your accountant.

Electronic invoicing. Under Ministerial Decision No. 244 of 2025, a business with revenue below AED 50 million appoints an Accredited Service Provider by 31 March 2027 and implements the Electronic Invoicing System by 1 July 2027. Sales to private individuals who are not in business stay outside the system until the Minister decides otherwise. VAT registration does not settle the question: Decision No. 243 applies to any person conducting business in the UAE, apart from the exclusions listed in Article 4(1) of the decision; car rental is not on that list. The decision defines an electronic invoice as one issued, transmitted and received in a structured electronic format, so an invoice typed in Excel or saved as a PDF does not qualify. The Ministry’s guidelines say that under electronic invoicing, PDF and paper invoices from businesses not registered for VAT must be replaced by electronic ones. A rental company with revenue below AED 50 million that invoices other companies will need a provider by those dates, registered for VAT or not.

Can two people work in one Excel file at the same time?

A file sent through a messenger becomes a separate copy for each person who opens it. Book the same free car in both copies and see what happens when both customers arrive.

A shared online file has no copies. Whether two people can edit at once depends on where the file is:

The rows come from Microsoft’s pages on co-authoring and on the “locked for editing” error, and from Google’s help. In desktop Excel, co-authoring needs the Microsoft 365 subscription version; Excel for the web supports it too. With the file on OneDrive or SharePoint in Microsoft 365, AutoSave shows other people’s changes within seconds. In Excel for Microsoft 365, earlier versions are under File > Info > Version History.

Google says you can edit an Excel file directly in Google Sheets together with other people. Its version history shows who changed the file, and restoring an earlier version clears the cell-by-cell edit history from before the restore.

A shared file still does not check dates. Two managers can type two bookings for one car into the same sheet. The formula in the Check column flags them.

When a spreadsheet is no longer enough

A rental fleet will not fill a spreadsheet. An Excel sheet holds 1,048,576 rows, and Google allows up to 20 million cells or 100 MB in a spreadsheet. What breaks first is the way you work. Some rows below are limits of any spreadsheet, others are limits of this template.

When these signs appear, look at a system that attaches charges to rentals by itself. See the car rental software we build in Dubai and the ALVI case. How contracts go into TARS is in our guide to RTA TARS.