Tracking Your Mileage Made Easy

Posted by David Chism | Wed, Sep 23, 2009

 Tracking Your Mileage Made Easy
photoI stum­bled upon a great lit­tle iPhone App that makes track­ing your mileage easy. If you need to track your miles for tax pur­pos­es or even to bill a client, Mile­Bug will prob­a­bly do the job. There is a paid and free ver­sion avail­able. The free ver­sion works great. You can only track up to ten logged items at once. How­ev­er, all you need to do is email the 10 items to your­self, delete them off your device and start over to keep the free ver­sion use­ful! Sev­er­al cool fea­tures I real­ly like about Mile­Bug:
  1. The abil­i­ty to have sev­er­al Busi­ness­es and Break­downs. In oth­er words, you can name your com­pa­ny and the pur­pose of the vis­its such as Esti­mates,” Project Man­age­ment” War­ran­ty Work.”
  2. Mul­ti­ple Vehi­cles: If your car is in the shop and you have to use a per­son­al vehi­cle or rental, you can add that to the program.
  3. Types and Rates: You can receive tax deduc­tions for char­i­ta­ble work and med­ical needs. So, if you are run­ning to the hos­pi­tal, click on med­ical” with­in the pro­gram to track your miles!
  4. Emailed Reports: The reports func­tion is the real win­ner. They are easy to read and VERY well orga­nized. All you do is select the range” of dates and click email.” It is that sim­ple. This way, if you have an esti­ma­tor using his own vehi­cle, he can use Mile­Bug to track his esti­mate calls, fol­low ups, etc. and email you a report right from his device, assum­ing he has an iPhone! If only RIM would be more proac­tive on mak­ing use­ful busi­ness appli­ca­tions for the Blackberry!
Final­ly, one of the draw­backs is using the Odome­ter fea­ture only. You have to dis­ci­pline your­self to remem­ber to track your mileage in the prop­er order. There­fore, if you logged in a trip on Wednes­day and for­got about your Mon­day trip login, it will mess up the Odome­ter. It would be real­ly nice if it had a fea­ture for just typ­ing in the mileage man­u­al. In the past, I just typed in the Direc­tions in Google Map, the Route I would take and write in the total 2‑way mileage. So that is the only major draw­back. Try out the free ver­sion. If it is as cool as I described, by the unlim­it­ed ver­sion for $3.99.

About David Chism

David Chism started his business out of a passion for helping small contracting businesses grow, be more profitable and become better known to their target clients. One lifelong hobby of David is using techie gadgets. So this blog is a place where he writes about technology, marketing ideas, just for fun (humor), personal thoughts on small business and more.

     
   
       

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