Keeping an accurate track of your business mileage is important for tax and expense records for any small business, sole trader or freelancer. A good mileage tracking system will help make it easy to manage your financial records and save you time.
A mileage-tracking app is a useful tool that normally works on your smartphone to help you quickly and efficiently manage your business mileage, your employee travel, and taxes. A good tracker app definitely saves you time when calculating tax on business travel and could help reduce your tax payable through accurate records.
And not only does mileage tracking help you stay organized and compliant, it also provides valuable insights into your driving habits and patterns – by analysing your driving data, you might be able to identify where you can make changes to your travel to help reduce fuel consumption or optimize your routes.
Our guide reviews five of the best mileage tracker apps that work well for small business owners to help you manage your business travel and financial records.
Advantage of a mileage tracking app
You could just use a notepad to jot down your trips, or add them to a spreadsheet, but using a mileage tracker has a range of benefits over these manual methods. Five key advantages are:
- Accuracy: Get rid of any errors if you manually record your mileage as the app automatically tracks your trips using GPS technology, ensuring that your mileage records are accurate and reliable.
- Time-saving: Manual mileage tracking can be a time-consuming task whereas an app does the job quickly and easily.
- Expense management: A mileage tracking app simplifies expense management by automatically calculating your mileage and providing detailed reports. This makes it easy to track your expenses, submit expense claims, and generate reports for tax purposes.
- Integration: Many mileage tracking apps integrate with other tools and platforms, such as accounting software or expense management systems. This seamless integration eliminates the need to transfer data or even re-key data and ensures that your trips are automatically synced across all your business systems.
- Cost savings: By accurately tracking your mileage, you can maximize your tax deductions and potentially save hundreds or even thousands of pounds each year. A mileage tracking app helps you capture every eligible deductible mile, ensuring that you don’t miss out on any potential savings.
Using a mileage tracker app
Mileage tracker apps are a real time-saving tool for many small businesses especially if you and your team drive for work then you’ll find using an app a good way to save time and manage tax and expenses calculations.
There are strict accounting regulations when it comes to documenting business mileage and you should keep a detailed log of your business trips with the dates, the purpose of the journey, and the total number of miles. Read our guide to the HMRC mileage rates payable for expenses.
You also need to use a mileage tracker if your small business has a lot of mileage expenses and reimbursements. For example, if you run a delivery business, a taxi, or offer a petrol allowance to your employees. Using a tracker makes managing your records more accurate, and saves time.
Five expense and mileage trackers
An ideal mileage tracker must efficiently track and log your business mileage and expenses without a complicated user interface. The tracker should automatically log your trips and let you categorise them based on different factors. With these in mind, we have picked out 5 of the best mileage trackers you can use for your small business.
- Hurdlr
- TripLog
- Everlance
- QuickBooks Online
- MileIQ
1. Hurdlr
Find out more at: hurdlr.com
Hurdlr is a great choice for self-employed individuals or freelancers – and this mileage-tracking application helps you log your expenses. It includes simple but useful accounting features.
Hurdlr has a free manual tracking feature that allows you to log your trips and includes some basic reporting as part of the free plan. If you upgrade to a paid-for plan, you get access to unlimited auto-mileage tracking, a real-time tax calculator and an auto-expense tracking feature. There’s also accounting features to help with your annual income tax filing and bookkeeping for your business together with more advanced reporting on the type of trips you’ve made.
The Enterprise plan (the second paid-for plan) is aimed at bigger businesses and includes a smart AI-based mileage tracking feature plus there’s training for your teams.
Pros
- Invoicing and accounting features
- Has expense tracker
- Excellent for freelancers
- Calculates quarterly estimated taxes
- Plenty of training on how to use this effectively
Cons
- No GPS tracking feature
2. TripLog
Find out more at triplogmileage.com
TripLog is a good mileage tracker for a small business with plenty of features at an affordable price. Along with mileage tracking, the TripLog premium scheduling plan includes a timesheet, scheduler, and expense tracker as part of the software package.
For a small business to try the system, look at the free plan (TripLog’s Lite plan), which allows one user to log up to 40 trips monthly on your smartphone. If you decide to use this with your team then the premium plan supports 10 users and adds features including expense tracking.
For bigger teams, there’s an enterprise plan that supports unlimited users and lets you create mileage claim policies to help your business manage costs.
Pros
- Free single-user plan
- Multiple tracking features
- Daily trip viewing and route planning
- Excellent interface
Cons
- Needs custom prices for over ten users
3. Everlance
Find out more at: everlance.com
The Everlance mileage tracker app includes an automatic tracking feature that supports GPS on your phone and gives you the option to track your driving in three ways: manual tracking, auto-detection, or by starting the app.
For hands-off easy tracking, select auto-detection mode and background mileage tracking will run when you’re using the app on your smartphone. You can always add a trip with manual mileage entry though there’s no timestamp feature with manual entry.
The app helps to automatically categorise your trips into business or personal based on working hours – if the tracker automatically logs trips made during normal working hours it will save these as business trips. There’s a tax-saving tool to help you manage your business allowable deductions.
Unlike Hurdlr or QuickBooks there’s no integrated bookkeeping system so you’ll need to work with another software product to manage your business accounting.
Pros
- Unlimited users in its free plan
- Specific mileage rates for various purposes
- In-app access to customer support
- Expense tracker, tax-saving, and reimbursement system included
Cons
- It does not have a clock-in/clock-out feature
- It doesn’t have a route-planning element
4. QuickBooks Online
Find out more at quickbooks.intuit.com/uk/mileage-tracking
QuickBooks is very well known for its accounting software and the platform provides a mileage and expense tracker, combining and integrating these together and supporting integration into the main QuickBooks platform. Once the mileage data is in your accounting system you can add it to your normal business expenses and manage your expenses and business tax returns.
The platform has an automatic tracking system using GPS in your phone that will record your trips each time you drive. Like several of the other apps mentioned, this app will auto-categorise your trips and you can select if the trip is business or personal for expense claims. The tracker also allows you to add trips, if required, and add the trip’s cost to a particular job invoice on the main accounting platform if you are re-charging all travel to a particular client or job.
QuickBooks Online also has an expense and income tracking feature, which you can leverage with its bookkeeping platform; the app is a paid-for add-on to the main accounting software with four pricing plans that add features, reporting and users with increasing price points.
Pros
- Comprehensive and standard bookkeeping features
- Easy-to-use
- Choose between standard rates or actual expenses for tax deductions
- Free mileage tracking app
Cons
- No route planning
5. MileIQ
Find out more at mileiq.com
MileIQ offers a simple-to-use platform for mileage tracking for you and your team and we think it’s the simplest mileage tracker to use to manage your mileage and expenses; it doesn’t include tax and expense tracking – take a look at TripLog (above) if you need these features.
On the mobile app, you start by selecting if the your trip is personal or business and then the phone will track as you drive. If you’ve an Apple phone you can access these features from the lock screen without starting the app.
The app tracks your driving even if you’re stuck in traffic – though after 15 minutes without moving it will assume you’ve parked and start a new trip once you start moving again.
MileIQ has pricing plans for Personal and Team use. For personal use, you can enjoy up to 40 trips monthly. However, you can make unlimited trips with the unlimited plan for personal usage. You can access the lite, teams, or teams pro plans for teams.
Pros
- Excellent choice for Microsoft 365 Business users
- Very affordable
- Innovative and simple user interface
- Driving classifications
- Personal and team usage pricing plans
Cons
- No expense tracker
- Lacks auto-tax deduction feature
Mileage rates allowances
The rate you can claim as an allowable expense is set by HMRC (read our detailed article on mileage allowance). The HMRC publishes the mileage rate table for each tax year (though the actual rates have not changed over the last 12 years) and and the mileage allowance rate for the current tax year remains at the following rate:
- 45p for the first 10,000 miles for business-purposes
- 25p for each business mile after the threshold of 10,000 miles.
You can claim an allowable expense for travel when you are:
- Going to meet a client
- Going from your office to another work-related place
- Going to a Business or company-related conference
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is the best mileage tracker for the UK?
There are many mileage trackers you can leverage in the U.K. For starters, we have listed five of the best mileage trackers you can use to keep your business running efficiently.
Do all small businesses need mileage trackers?
Not all small businesses need mileage trackers. You can use a mileage tracker if you run a transport company. Additionally, you can use these trackers if you want to reimburse, track your colleagues or make easy tax deductions.
What features must all mileage trackers have?
The trackers you choose for your mileage tracker depend on what you need. However, you must ensure that your mileage tracker tracks mileage. Other features include bookkeeping, which will help if your mileage tracker uses GPS.
Summary
If you or your colleagues in your business drive for work and claim back this travel on expenses, then you’ll find a mileage tracker app a time-saver to help you track your mileage and produce your expense and tax reports. There are many different apps on the market and we’ve reviewed five of the best tracker apps that you can use to help you manage this part of your business travel more effectively.
