Ever since I filed my initial business paperwork with the State of California and had a CPA help me setup my finances, I have been using the MileIQ app to track the miles I’ve driven for business. Now that I go see clients and take them shopping, there’s a lot more driving. Hence it’s worth tracking this for a tax deduction at the end of the year.
You install the app on your phone and then you don’t have to worry about it. It automatically tracks all the miles you’ve driven from location to location. You can also login to your account on the desktop.
Dashboard
Here are some snapshots from my MileIQ dashboard. Once you classify drives as personal or business use, then you can see the breakdown of how many miles are for each category. There are more specific categories as well if you want to specify what type of personal or work drive it was. Hm I’m not so good at using those other categories as you can see.
I’m not a tax expert, but I believe you have to have records to know what the purpose of the business drive was for if you want to deduct it. I have been adding manual notes when I classify each drive, so I know what the trip was for. My work Google calendar also has record of the meetings that I have on each day.
Custom Reports
The other convenient part of MileIQ is that you can generate custom reports of your drives based on your preferred time window, which vehicle, and what type of drives you want to include. This “Reports” feature is useful at the end of the year when I’m prepping to do my taxes and I need a cumulative number of how many business miles I drove.
Tax Deduction
I know there are 2 ways to calculate your business deduction for your car – either manually through every actual expense that you had for your car that year OR you can take the standard IRS mileage rate. I’m too lazy to track all the expenses I had for my car, so I use the standard rate per mile. For 2018, I believe the IRS says the rate was 54.5 cents per mile driven.
I don’t need to do the precise calculation myself. In TurboTax, I just entered in the total miles driven on my car and total business miles driven on my car, and TurboTax handles the rest. According to my MileIQ report for 2018, I drove 2044 miles for my business!
For more details on how I did my own taxes, see this blog article.
Email Reports
MileIQ also emails you weekly summaries of your mileage reports and monthly summaries. This can be annoying if you haven’t been classifying your drives and is a guilty reminder you should be. Oops. On the other hand, the emails are useful because one time the app wasn’t working, and it stopped tracking, so I realized I had to go in and fix it. Anyhow, here’s my summary from last month. See how much it’s worth when you track your miles!?!
Mobile App
There’s a mobile app as well, where you can swipe left or right to classify a drive as personal or business. I was really bad at classifying them before, so the backlog really grew. So in doing my taxes this year, I had to go back and classify almost 10 MONTHS of drives from Feb – Dec 2018, not remembering why on earth I drove to certain locations!! Now I’ve decided to classify them as the drives happen. It’s fun to swipe too! 😛 As you can see, I’m all caught up for March!
So that wraps up everything about MileIQ!
If it’s something that interests you, you can get 20% off an annual subscription by using my referral link. I’ve been an annual subscriber for almost a year now, and will be renewing for another year! Or you can try the free account and get 40 free drives per month.
Note: The links in this post are Refer-A-Friend links to MileIQ. This post is not sponsored.
Thanks for reading! For more recommendations on apps, tools, movies for business or personal development, check out the “Recommended” section on my blog.
