15
Aug

New Tool for Tracking Mileage

As an Entrepreneur, we are responsible to know what and how to track our business information for tax purposes.  And there is just a ton of things that need to be tracked throughout the year.  One of them that has always been a little bit of a struggle for me is mileage.  Sometimes I drive over 100 miles a day to work with clients and mileage is a tax write-off that I want to track accurately.  So, I decided to take action this weekend.

There are a lot of reasons that we need to track our daily mileage.  Whether you are a business owner, work for a company that requires you to travel or track mileage for medical reasons; having an accurate way to track mileage is necessary.

Keeping a log in the car – a great idea ( if you remember to enter in the information); pulling addresses works from mapquest works well – but requires a ton of time to maintain (printing out all that information just doesn’t seem like a good use of my time and money in ink and paper).  I felt as if there had to be another answer.

I’m just a little behind the times, my Android phone is just a few months old.  But this weekend, I set aside some time from laying out this week’s projects abd I decided to find out how I could track my mileage via my cell phone.  The habit of tracking my mileage needed to change.  I needed to use a system that was quick, easy and friendly – I didn’t have a ton of time to sit and learn a new program, not right now.  So, I began my search and within a short period of time – about an hour – I found my answer. 

My mileage tracking system needed to be user friendly, and allow me to print out monthly spreadsheets that I can use to hand in to my accountant.  I decided on Mileage Tracker for only $1.99.  With this system I can easily enter in my odometer reading.

Some of the features that sold me on the product were:  it tracks the US IRA Standard Rates for mileage; I can enter in more than one vehicle information – if needed; I can email monthly reports to my computer; I can pull up a variety of reports and it will save my information without my phone being on.  While I’m not typically a “gadget” person, this seems to be a great answer to my mileage-tracking needs.

With the restrictions getting tighter and tighter for business owners, it is necessary for us to have a system that we can consistently track mileage accurately.  This is one of the areas that we typically under-estimate for our taxes..because you don’t want to over-estimate, right! 

The mileage-tracker program seems to be the uncomplicated answer for those of us who are not “gadget” needy and for only $1.99 I figure what did I have to lose!  I’ll keep you updated on how it is going and you can check it out for yourself @ https://market.android.com/details?id=com.softmimo.android.mileagetracker.