Business mileage tracker for small business owners

A contractor, a consultant, a cleaner, a photographer, a real estate agent, or a mobile mechanic drives to clients, suppliers, and job sites all week. Each drive is deductible when it is recorded with its date, destination, business purpose, and miles. Most of those drives are never written down, and a year's deduction is lost to the gap between the intention and the log. Miles is a business mileage tracker that records every drive on its own and asks only for the classification.

This page is general information, not tax advice.

The workflow

1. Add your vehicle with the date you placed it in service and the odometer reading at the start of the year. Schedule C asks for both.
2. Tag your places. Home, your regular workplace if you have one, and the clients and suppliers you visit often. Turn on Home office if your home is your principal place of business.
3. Drive. Every drive is detected and recorded. Drives to and from a tagged client are classified as business by rule. The rest wait at the top of the Drives list for a swipe.
4. Add a note when the purpose is not obvious. "Site measure for the Hawthorne kitchen" is enough. Publication 463 says a written statement of purpose is not needed when the purpose is clear from the circumstances, and a client's name usually makes it clear.
5. Attach parking and tolls to the drive they belong to.

The home office rule

If your home is your principal place of business, drives from home to another work location in the same business are deductible. If it is not, the first drive of the day to your regular workplace is commuting, and commuting is never deductible. Miles applies the distinction with the Home office toggle, so the same drive from home to a client is classified the way your situation requires. What the IRS requires in a mileage log walks through the commuting cases from Publication 463, including temporary work locations and a second job.

What Schedule C asks for

Car and truck expenses go on line 9. Part IV asks when you placed the vehicle in service, your business, commuting, and other miles for the year, whether the vehicle was available for personal use, whether you have another vehicle for personal use, and whether you have evidence to support the deduction and whether it is written. The tax summary answers each item from your log and your vehicle record. How to track mileage for taxes shows where each number comes from.

Standard mileage rate or actual expenses

If you own the vehicle and want the standard mileage rate, you must choose it the first year the vehicle is used in your business. Miles records the expenses either way and shows the deduction figured both ways, so the choice in year one is made with numbers. Five or more vehicles in business use at the same time rule out the standard rate, and the app warns you when you get there. The standard mileage rate vs. actual expenses guide covers the rules.

Real estate agents and other many-stop days

An agent's week is showings, open houses, inspections, and trips to the brokerage. Few of the drives are long, and there are many of them, which is why a paper log stops in February. Tag the brokerage as your regular workplace, or turn on Home office if you work from home, and tag the listings, the title company, and the inspector's office you return to. Each showing becomes a recorded drive with its address, and a drive to a listed property by an agent explains its own purpose. A client's name does not need to be in the log. Publication 463 lets you keep confidential information elsewhere, and notes marked private in Miles stay out of every export. See privacy.

Canada

A Canadian sole proprietor reports on Form T2125 and deducts actual vehicle costs in proportion to business kilometres over total kilometres. The odometer readings at the start and end of the year are required. See T2125 motor vehicle expenses.

Video

This page's video shows a day of client visits. The steps it records are written up in the client visits video script.