Tracking Your Mileage Made Easy

I 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.