Looking for a mileage tracking app

The joy of having your own business is that you need to track mileage for business related jobs. As mine is a part-time business, this makes it even more fun (not!) as I have a daily job I go to and I tried MileIQ but it requires you to track every single drive and it has no intelligence. I also chatted with TaxBot people and it does not auto-classify either.

What I’m looking for is to classify a location (like my day job location) and for the mileage app to automatically categorize this as personal every day and not require me to ever click on a classification (swipe or otherwise).

In my dream world, when I have customers, I visit their house and would like to tag their location and their job and let me assign that particular job to other drives (to get materials or when I’m visiting a sub-contractor).

Any recommendations?

I just find it fastest to work through a list of my trips using Google maps. I do this at the end of each month for invoicing purposes.

No experience with it but Leo Laporte recommends Automatic, an OBD2 device that plugs into your car and talks to your phone. I guess the benefit there is it’s more accurate/reliable than using your phone’s GPS alone. There are several 3rd party apps that work with it.

I kinda want to get one to play around with.

How do you do this? I so rarely use Google maps, I have no idea.

I saw that and almost bought on the spot for the engine code diagnostics alone (what a cool timesaver, being able to read engine warning codes w/out having to go to a mechanic!), but I didn’t see anything about how it classifies the trips. I really want the ability to set a default of personal and then only classify those that aren’t.

BTW - in the meantime, a RL friend recommended triplog and it does have a nice feature for setting defaults, so I’m going to investigate it more.

Ah, if you don’t know about your Google location history, check that out. Probably requires an Android phone and using Google Maps, but it generally records all my trips automatically and I can sort to the day. https://www.google.com/maps/timeline

What I do at the end of the month is open my Outlook Calendar in one window and the history in the other, then record my mileage. Sometimes the distance is funny or the trip isn’t there so I use directions to plot the trip and get a distance.

Hopefully I didn’t startle you that all your data is already collected and processed for you :).

Holy crap. I had no idea. That’s really interesting. So you just start out on the 1st day of the month and hit next, going through the entire month. I think this might work.

Are they also a sponsor? A lot of podcasts I listen to would occasionally praise it after their ad reads for it. The reviews on the App Store and Amazon were pretty bad, but I got one anyway. Every time you get in your car you have to manually make sure it connects, because 90% of the time it won’t unless you recently opened the app. Even then it drops the connection fairly frequently while driving. On top of that the software is very limited, they could do so much with the data, but they don’t. It is a neat toy, but I wouldn’t use it if tracking is important, it’s too limited and unreliable.

I’m horrible at tracking my miles and usually just go through Outlook and try to correlate emails to trips and I’m sure I always under report. The last expense report I did I found that Google Location History and that worked awesome. There’s times where a meeting doesn’t get canceled on my calendar and if I can’t remember going for sure or not I can just pull up that day and see where I was.

That being said I keep telling myself a notebook would probably be the simplest way for me to track it.