Tracking business miles for tax purposes
 

I was wondering if it was possible for us to get an additional box when adding a fuel-up to add business miles driven. The website tracks everything that is needed for business expense and income tax purposes except the business mileage aspect of it. I would see this as a large benefit to your customer base and would also allow people who don't care as much about fuel mileage but just business expense tracking to use your website. I love Fuelly and I advise my clients to track their mileage and fuel expenses through your website.

I can definitely see how this would be useful. The problem is that it complicates the fuel-up form and I'm not sure we'd have enough people using it to justify that.

With the current system you could store business miles in the notes field. Then, when it's time to add everything up, export your fuel-ups. Add the notes column up in a spreadsheet program like Excel and you'd have your business miles total. Not as handy as having Fuelly calculate it for you, but it could work.

I could imagine seeing this being an option added to your fuel up form that is off by default.

How would you want it to work? Should it be a business "slider" of percent like the highway/city one or just an absolute number? I've never tracked business miles too strictly myself so I'm unsure of what the easiest and most normal way to do this is.

https://biztaxlaw.about.com/b/2010/01...d-a-lesson.htm

From the above website:

IRS Requirements for Mileage

The IRS wants "timely and accurate" records. They expect you to keep a "daily log showing miles traveled, destination and business purpose." My CPA suggested I look back through my 2009 business calendar to see if I recorded any trips, but it might be difficult for the IRS to accept any records I produce, since they weren't created at the time of the travel.

I don't think that would fit in with fuelly - they want individual trips to be logged, not just the mileage.

As long as you aren't adding more stuff to the export.CSV files again. I hate having to recode my importing with Excel... The last time it was lat/long that messed me up out of the blue.

LOL

Sorry for taking so long to respond...

While according to the IRS you are supposed to keep a daily log book, they accept many less stringent forms of documentation. I have actually given an IRS agent an oil change receipt in January and December and called it 25% of the net change.

I currently use the notes section to document my business mileage but I was wanting a place to put a hard number as opposed to a sliding scale. I think most IRS agents would accept an excel spread sheet with total mileage, fuel cost and business mileage updated every fuel up, it just seems more reasonable than updating daily mileage journal, which no one does unless they are a truck driver.

To be honest I just thought it would be a nice addition to enter in at the fuel up section because for me tracking my mileage in my TDI is about saving money and another way to save money to correctly track your business miles and deduct them on your income tax return. You currently get 55 cents per mile which really adds up over to course of a year.