New apps for our cell phones spring up all the time. These apps can provide entertainment, convey specific information, connect us with friends and colleagues, and even function as tools to help us in our daily lives. Two such subsets of these “toolbox” apps are the mileage trackers and financial budgeting apps. In this blog, we’ll take a quick look into the mileage trackers, and save the financial budgeting apps for a later blog!
Mileage tracking apps can vastly simplify the process, with the added benefit of producing IRS-ready reports at year’s end! All of these apps utilize your cell phone’s GPS tracking abilities, and generally record each drive you take. You simply need to identify the nature of each trip, be it business, commuting, personal, or otherwise, often with the ease of a simple swipe! Some apps have the added ability to record other automobile expenses, such as gas, oil changes and repairs, by allowing you to take a picture of the receipt and classifying it accordingly. At the end of the accounting period, the app can produce a comprehensive report for you. Thus, these apps can help you save time, produce documentation to support your mileage deductions, and most back up to the cloud, so you can’t lose the data!
Some of the more popular tracking apps for the iPhone include Mileage Expense Log, MileIQ, TripLog, TaxMileage, MileBug, TrackMyDrive, MileTracker, and AutoMiles. For the Android, popular mileage tracker apps include MileIQ, TripLog, FuelBuddy, MileageLogGPSTracker, Fuelio and Everlance. Some of these apps are free, some are free up to a certain number of drives, and some come with a monthly or annual expense, but the benefit derived from the time saved in logging trips, and the missed trips you didn’t bother to record, quickly make even the apps with a cost well worth the value.