Taking the pain out of mileage tracking!

Mileage tracking is a pain, but it’s necessary if you want to make sure you get back what you’re entitled to! There are a range of methods to keep track as you go, or you have to revisit your diary at the end of the month (or year!) to work out what you can claim. But not any more…. Watch this to find out about a really easy solution!

Transcript:

Hi, and welcome to another episode of BaranovTV, designed to demystify the world of accounts and tax and to help your business grow.

This episode, I wanted to talk to you about mileage and, specifically, how much of pain it is, and we know it is, to actually track your business mileage, your personal mileage, and actually be able to report that, for your accounts every year.

There’re different ways of doing it:

• You can do it very manually and just have a notepad in the car and write a note every time you go on a business trip.
• You can do it at the end of a week, end of a month, sit down and look back at your calendar and then troll through Google and try and work out what your mileage was.

There’re lots of different ways of doing it but there has to be an easier one!

We think we’ve found one that works quite nicely. It’s an app called MileIQ.

Why do we like it?

1. It’s designed and owned by Microsoft, so you may decide that that’s a good thing or a bad thing. The upside of it is if you do have Microsoft Office 365, then the subscription to MileIQ is free, which is nice.
2. It’s affordable – they have a free option, for up to 40 drives per month and  then at $5.99 per month, you get unlimited drives.
3. The thing we like about it is that MileIQ runs in the background constantly, which, obviously, you need to be aware of in terms of your battery, but it automatically knows when you’re driving.
4. It’s swipe left for business, swipe right for personal, though it might be the other way round! But ultimately, you can really easily differentiate between the different types of drive.
5. You can also set up custom drives, which means that you can say, right, the school run, this is the school run, this is to work, this is home from work, this is to my regular place of business. You can actually set it up so that it categorizes, because, obviously, being able to reclaim and recoup the tax from the mileage will depend on the purpose of the journey. Your standard journey to and from work isn’t claimable, so you really want to discount that.
6. It’s really, really easy to set up.
7. You can have multiple users, choosing a team option, so if you’ve got a lot of drivers, then they can all have MileIQ. You can’t track them from it from a data perspective but I don’t know that you’d necessarily want to, this is really all about the mileage tracking.

MileIQ does seem to be really useful. It’s affordable and it’s nice and easy to use, what more can you say, really? Have a look, see what you think. Let me know if you think it’s useful, and I’ll see you all very soon.