How to Save Thousands of Dollars by Recording Your Mileage [Podcast]

[smart_track_player url="https://soundcloud.com/ticktockpodcast/2-how-to-save-thousands-of-dollars-by-recording-your-mileage" social="true" social_twitter="true" social_facebook="true" social_linkedin="true" ]You're probably dropping the ball when it comes to tracking your mileage.James and Sean review an app that will ensure you never miss out on another opportunity to write off your business mileage: MileIQ.

Show Notes

Things we mentioned:

• MileIQ - The app that automatically saves your drive routes and easily build beautiful driving reports for you. (link)

Social Links:

• Tick Tock Podcast- Facebook | Twitter
• Sean Blackburn- Twitter | LinkedIn
• James Carbary- Twitter | LinkedIn

[Tweet "Save thousands of dollars by tracking your business mileage. @TickTockPodcast reviews @MileIQ"]

Transcript:

Sean:Welcome to the Tick Tock Podcast Episode Two. Today we are talking about MileIQ.James:Man, Sean I first started MileIQ a couple of months ago. When you first download the app, I wasn’t paying for it for a few months. I forget how it limits your functionality actually. I quickly noticed that it was saving me a ton of money because literally it automatically logs all of your drives.We checked out their website and just from their about section, wanted to read a section of their site. It says in early 2013, product designer, entrepreneur and tax geek Dan Bomze decided it was time to simplify Mileage Reimbursement. Imagining a mash up of his business credit card and the Fitbit, he believed the smart phone should be able to automatically log his drives, calculate their value and sink his mileage reports with his tax expense and accounting software.That’s exactly what it does. It’s so easy. I remember before I was using this super manual system. I was having to go in and I used this really clunky app while I have to put in the address where I started, the address where I went and then it would hook in to Google Maps and it would calculate the mileage.Sean:That’s even better than what I was doing man. I was in the dark ages. I was literally trying to just write down in a logbook that I had.James:Oh my gosh.Sean:I drove from here to here. I would just go back and find the mileage on Google Maps myself and then submit it to the accountant at the company I was working with at the time. I know that it was bothering him, my lack of system for tracking.James:Really you missed so much because …Sean:Yeah, like you said. I didn’t get hardly any mileage I was actually driving.James:With MileIQ, the downside is you have to keep your location services all the time. It has a tendency towards draining your battery because the location services are on. If you're battery already sucks then using MileIQ will likely make it worse.Sean:It wasn’t too bad for me though just to speak to that for a second. What I would do a lot of times is there’d be certain times of the day that I’d be driving for business or driving for time that I’d be getting reimbursed for. There’s other times that I wasn’t. I would disable location settings and like you said that always is enabled. I would definitely close the app and make sure that it wasn’t running the background as much as possible. That seemed to help. It wasn’t too bad for me.James:Got it. Last month alone, I think it logged $485 in business travel for me. The format of it is really cool. It logs every trip you take and then whenever you open the app, you can literally slide right to classify it as a business expense and slide left if it’s personal. Right now I haven't opened the app in a little bit. I've got 22 drives that I need to classify but I literally classify these 22 drives. That sounds like a ton, but it literally takes me less than two minutes.Sean:Two minutes.James:It’s just simple swipe functionality. Swipe left for personal, swipe right for business and then it tells you for August, it shows me I've got $47 in business travel logged. Really it’s just a matter of doing the other way. I just wasn’t getting it done. There’s all this money left on the table at the end of the year that I wasn’t able to write off whereas with this, I'm literally going to be able to write off thousands of dollars this year in mileage just because MileIQ made it easier for me to log it.Sean:There’s probably a lot of people who are listening to the show that are starting their side hustle on the side. Maybe they're entrepreneurs at heart but they're still a company. It’s even good for people who are within that 9:00-5:00 in corporate world because it creates these beautiful reports that your accountant or your controller are going to love as well because it’s a tool that really helps keep you accountable from a standpoint of the drives you have on that are literally where your car has gone. It is definitely something that you have done no matter what.James:I paid $60 for the year for this. Literally, I'm going to save thousands of dollars by being able to write off all of this mileage on my taxes this year and cost me $60. It’s really a no brainer.Like Sean was saying, if you're in the corporate world, it’s probably something that your company will cover for you just because it’s going to make their accountant’s life so much easier to be able to track any time your car moves on behalf of the company. They’ll know it. That’s MIleIQ. Love this too. Endorse it wholeheartedly.If you guys have used MileIQ, we’d love to hear from you. Tell us what you love, what you don’t love. You can go to @ticktockpodcast on Twitter and let us know what you think there. Thank you guys a ton and until next time.