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So Better Half is not fond of smart phones, but I do have one (a Pixel, so Android), and she has now decided that it is time for me to add a Mileage App….as she notes, most trips we take involve a stop at a thrift store or yard sale or something related to reselling, so we really should be tracking all this.
So…..recommendations?
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It may be overkill if all you want to do is track mileage, but if you’re serious about selling and keeping track of your business expenses, costs, sales and taxes and all that you may want to consider Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed. I’ve used this for a number of years and while there’s either a monthly or yearly cost to it, it works very well and has built in tracking for trips and such which I find extremely valuable.
I also use it to track my monthly spending to see my store’s overall sales metrics as I buy most of my goods online with a business credit card (for points mostly) and can see sales vs. costs at any time. This also helps a lot around tax time as it groups things into categories for me and greatly speeds up the tax filing process.
If you want to give them a try, they have a 30 day free trial (I don’t make any money from this link, it’s just a standard link to the one on their website):
https://signup.quickbooks.intuit.com/?locale=en-us&offerType=trial&bc=OBI-LL1&offerId=20020224
Best of luck ^_^
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Using a business credit card has a higher level of risk and less consumer protections than a standard credit card. The owner has a greater duty to protect the security of the account, even if he is the only one with a card.
This is the main reason I don’t have business credit cards.
Clark Howard talks about this all of the time.
Just some food for thought..
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So Cal Joe,
You’re definitely right :). I’m just a sole proprietor so my “business credit card” is actually just a personal card that I designate for business purchases (shipping and supplies mostly) but it’s a good distinction to make. I should have been clearer 🙂 thanks for clarifying that fact!
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By the way, if you do decide you want to stick with the app and pay for it, you can get 50% off with my friends and family link ($7 a month instead of $15) for your first 6 months:
Sincerely,
JJ Parks ^_^
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I’ve been using Everlance for a few years . Works great. just a left/ right swipe after a “trip” for business/ personal.
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I’ve also been with them for years now. It’s definitely not perfect with the auto trip functionality, but it is definitely ‘good enough’.
There has been times I’ve went a month without categorizing my trips. Since every trip is logged with a map and addresses it is easy to know which trip is business and which are personal. Being able to not think about mileage 99% of the time is more than worth the price of admission.
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This is more of a hack, but has worked well for me for the past several years. If you turn on location tracking on your android phone (not sure if it works for iPhone) it will record every trip you make passively. It has a fairly high level of accuracy and I don’t have to remember to record every trip. If you’re disciplined you could go in once a week or month while things are still fresh in your mind, but I usually go through it when I’m doing my taxes. I create a quick spreadsheet and enter date and location/business, just in case I get audited.
Here’s a screen shot of a trip looks looks like:
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I have been wondering something about about mileage tracking apps for a long time:
Consider this scenario: You go shopping for personal/food items at a location 30 miles away – that’s the main reason you are going there. 5 miles before you get there, you stop at a thrift store that’s on the way. Then on the way back home, you stop at another thrift store that is 10 miles from home.
I assume that the mileage app divides this up into 4 trips:
1) 25 miles from home to thrift
2) 5 miles from thrift to food store
3)Â 20 miles from food store to second thrift store
4) 10 miles from second thrift store to home.
How do you mileage-app-using folks classify each of these 4 trip segments? I don’t use one, and for such scenarios I would log zero business miles b/c I incurred no extra miles above what I would have in order to travel to the store that was my main destination.
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