Peace of Mind Organizing

App of the week: Milebug

1 June 2012

I blogged about the mileage-tracking app Milebug last year, after I realized how much time it was saving me on my taxes. Back then, I was using it on my iPod Touch.

Now, I have my beloved iPhone. And since I’ve decided to do an App of the Week post every Friday, I thought it would be worthwhile to talk about it again.

Milebug makes it very easy for me to track my mileage. As a business owner who travels to client sites, I’m eligible to deduct my mileage—to the tune of 55 cents a mile; definitely worth the effort. Milebug makes the process easy: as I pull out of the garage, I pull my iPhone out of my purse and touch the Milebug icon. I simply record my destination and purpose (I can do that with one touch for my most frequent trip, pictured at right, from to a client’s home for the purpose of a client appointment). I also record the odometer reading. On a typical day, I might have an open trip—yesterday’s client visit, for example. When that happens, I record the closing mileage, which automatically becomes the beginning mileage if I add a new trip. Easy peasy.

Before Milebug, I did this with a pen in a little notebook I kept in my car visor. That was almost as easy. But Milebug has a distinct advantage: I just email a spreadsheet of the trips to myself. It even calculates the mileage deduction, since it knows the federal rates (and as long as I keep it updated, it knows if the federal mileage rate changes mid-year). Back when I did this by hand, I would spend a very tedious hour, sometimes longer, calculating the mileage.

Some entrepreneurs I know use Google Maps to calculate their mileage after the fact. Talk about tedious. Milebug is infinitely more convenient, if you ask me.

It all boils down to creating the habit of entering the mileage, something that’s now almost automatic for me after doing it for so long. If you can find something you always do in your car that you can anchor it to (for me, it’s waiting for the garage door to go down; for you it might be fastening your seatbelt or putting on your sunglasses), it makes it an easy habit to form.

I love my iPhone 4S so much I’m rarely without it. (I actually sleep with it under my pillow.) That makes it the perfect place to record my mileage. And Milebug makes that easy.

Tagged with: app of the week, apps, car, milebug, taxes, technology

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