Tracking your miles – MileIQ
If you are like me, then you struggle to accurately track and categorize the business and personal miles travelled in your vehicle. Logbooks and excel charts seem to be too messy and unreliable for me, so I attempted to employ an app to make my life easier. I investigated a bunch of apps, downloaded a number of them and tested a few. Most of the offerings have the same basic features – automatically tracking your trips and calculating the reimbursement amount (based on region). What really separates the various apps is the subscription cost and ease of use. Of the apps I tested, the one that suited me the most was the Microsoft MileIQ since it had the features I needed and recognized my trips perfectly. The comprehensive reports mean that payroll can more quickly process and audit work-related trips. 
The nicest “feature” is that Miley is a Microsoft Mobile Data Labs app, so is included in my Office 365 Business Premium subscription at no additional cost. If you have such a subscription and have need of a mileage tracker then I highly recommend giving the MileIQ app a try. You can try the free version as well, but you are limited to 40 drives in a month. The app is available for iOS and Android.
After your day is done, you can open the MileIQ app to properly categorize any trips made. Swiping the drive one way or the other allows you to log it as a business or a personal trip with a specific purpose if you like. You can set the app to automatically log trips started outside of work hours as personal to reduce the amount of time you need to spend swiping and recording trips. Being able to label trip destinations with a client name also makes billing easier since those details are included in the monthly reports. This history of your drives are kept and can be accessed by logging into your account either via the web portal or the app itself – I have found the web portal to be easier when dealing with the history.
The app obviously needs to run in the background, monitoring your phone’s sensors to detect the start and stop of a trip, however, I have not noticed a noticeable impact on my iPhone’s battery life.
To sign up for MileIQ with you office 365 Business Premium account, navigate to:
