Worth it?
Is tracking your mileage actually worth the hassle?
Short answer: yes, and it's usually the highest-paid few seconds of your shift. Here's the arithmetic instead of the sales pitch.
What untracked miles cost you
Delivery apps generally report the miles from pickup to drop-off. They do not report the drive to the restaurant, the drive back toward your zone, or the circling you do between orders. For a lot of drivers that unreported portion is a third to a half of all the miles they put on the car.
Put numbers on it. If you drive 15,000 business miles a year and only 9,000 show up in the app, you are leaving 6,000 miles unclaimed. At a $0.70 mileage rate that's $4,200 of deduction. At a ~30% effective rate for a self-employed driver, that's roughly $1,200 of your money handed over because nobody wrote it down.
The second payoff: knowing which shifts are worth working
Tracking miles per shift also gives you the honest hourly figure. Two shifts that both paid $120 are not the same shift if one cost you 40 miles and the other cost you 110. You can only tell the difference if the miles are attached to the shift. Run your last shift through the calculator and see the gap for yourself.
How much work is it really?
- Odometer method: note the reading when you go online and when you stop. Ten seconds a shift, and it captures every mile.
- Spreadsheet: free, works, but you have to remember and it's easy to fall behind.
- An app that tracks per shift: nothing to remember, and it can attach expenses and pay to the same shift so the true hourly rate comes out automatically.
Start today, not in January
A log written as you drive is what the IRS wants, and a reconstructed year is both weaker and painful to produce. Even if you only start now, every mile from today forward counts.
Want this done for you automatically?
True Shift tracks the miles, the expenses and the hours, then shows what each shift actually paid. Join the waitlist for early access.