Driving for ridesharing companies has many benefits as you are actually your own boss. However, it also comes with costs such as self-employment taxes. In this article, we will show you how to lower your business taxes using the best mileage tracker app you can find.
New ridesharing drivers might not think of it as an important matter, but as an independent contractor, you should always keep track of the miles you drive. The reason is that none of these companies will reimburse you for the usage of your personal vehicle so all the money you spend on everything including car payments, insurance, gas, and maintenance is actually going to be paid out of your pocket. Lucky for you, the IRS allows you to receive some of your taxes back based on the miles you drive or your expenses. This is why you need a good mileage tracking app.
The standard IRS mileage rate for business use in 2020 is now 57.5 cents per mile. This means if you drive 100 miles each month, for example, there will be $57.5 back in your pocket off taxes you would have paid. That is why a good mileage tracking app comes in handy because you will need proof to show IRS the number of working miles you were driving.
Which Is The Best Miles App For Rideshare Drivers?
Here is a list of possible Mileage Tracking app Features:
- IRS-complaint expense reports for mileage rates
- All driving records saved to the cloud
- Produce maps of your driving routes
- Auto-detection – app detects automatically when you’re driving
- Ability to upload photos of receipts and tag those receipts with a description, time and date
- Categorize business vs. personal miles
- Accuracy of mileage tracking
- Amount of cell phone battery usage of the app
There are many mileage apps on the market, but you definitely want to use a mileage app that does what you need it to do as a ride share driver. Some of the features above are clearly important in choosing apps you want to use. For example a low rate of battery usage is a good thing since you already have other apps draining your battery. One way around this is just using one app to perform everything you need.
You want apps that are easy to use so you don’t get lost while trying to find a detailed report on your driving miles. Clearly, you don’t want to spend too much time figuring out how to work with that app when that time can be used earning money.
There are four functions that matter when evaluating the best mileage tracker app:
- Tracking Miles (automatic or manual)
- Itemized Expense Tracking
- Major Event Tracking & Alerts
- Airport Flight & Traffic Information
This is not to say you only want one app to handle all of these, but you want a top app for each function. Let’s break them down by features and cost.
We are only going to talk about the best of the best and not review every app out there. We have already evaluated everything and picked only our top players which have sterling reviews and functionality. There are also some free options of these apps, which will help you out when you begin rideshare driving.
Best Mileage Tracker & Tax Tracking Apps If You Already Use Them:
Rating: 4.6 overall
Availability: iOS, Android. laptop, desktop, or tablet.
Cost: Free 40 drives per month. Or $5.99 mo. ($4.99 per month if billed annually).
Features:
- Automatically logs your miles without needing to press any special buttons during trips
- Integrates with Freshbooks and Excel
- Creates a record of all your tax deductible and reimbursable mileage
- Categorize each trip as either personal, charity, or professional with one swipe
- Classify drives by category based on a schedule
- Pull Drive reports anytime by time, location, events and more
- Available from any device
Downside:
- Free version is not realistic as a rideshare driver almost always does more than 40 trips a month
- The mileage tracking accuracy has been questioned a bit? (please see study below)
- Doesn’t include itemized expense tracking
- Doesn’t include major event tracking & alerts
- Doesn’t include airport flight & traffic information
- Doesn’t integrate with your accounting software seamlessly
- No manual tracking function
- Does not support multiple income sources
- Does not sync with credit card or bank
- Does not track business & personal revenue
- Cannot manually enter trips
Rating: 4.7 overall
Availability: iOS, Android. laptop, desktop, or tablet.
Cost: $12.50 mo.
Features:
- Extremely accurate automatic mileage tracking
- Track miles without draining your phone’s battery
- Mileage data is saved and categorized to maximize deductions
- Recommend whichever deduction is greater between mileage and itemized expenses
- Receipts are stored, organized, and ready for tax time
- Import expenses directly from your bank account
- Sort business from personal spending
- Track all expenses in one place and save time on taxes
- Transaction information is seamlessly entered for you
- We’ll match and categorize expenses automatically
- Effortlessly invoice customers from your smartphone
- Keep tabs on open invoices and send overdue notifications
- Get paid faster by enabling online payments
- Schedule and pay bills right from QuickBooks
- Pay bills via bank transfer/debit card (free) or defer payments with a credit card (2.9%)
- Choose the method of payment a vendor receives (direct deposit or physical check)
- Available from any device
- If you already use QuickBooks essentials this comes with the plan
- App uses a low amount of mobile data
Downside:
- Overpaying for tools you do not need unless you have a small business or other contracting job
- Free version not available
- Doesn’t print map lines of where you drive like Mile IQ, Stride, Everlance, Hurdlr & Gridwise
- Cannot manually enter trips
- Doesn’t include major event tracking & alerts
- Doesn’t include airport flight & traffic information
Best Mileage Tracker & Tax Tracking Apps:
Rating: 4.9 overall
Availability: iOS and Android
Cost: Free up to 30 rides a month, then $8/month or $60/year
Features:
- Everlance mileage tracker has a clean look and simple interface and is easy to use.
- Automatic IRS forms for mileage deductions
- Expense tracking through photo receipts (helpful for car details, gas purchases, and more)
- Automatic mileage tracking
- Automatic categorization of type of miles based manual hours you choose
- Compare mileage tracker vs itemized expenses to save the most at year end
- Sync Banks & Credit Cards. Automate your expense tracking
Downside:
- Users have reported some faulty automatic tracking, so make sure you test a few times before committing to pay
- Heavy battery drain reported
- You will need to use paid version as a rideshare driver almost always does more than 30 trips a month
- Doesn’t include major event tracking & alerts
- Doesn’t include airport flight & traffic information
Rating: 4.7 overall
Availability: iOS, Android & Windows Web App
Cost: Basic version is free; full version $7.99/month or $58.99/year
Features:
- Most accurate in one mileage tracking test (see below)
- Tracks mileage automatically or manually
- Free version includes expense and semi-automatic mileage tracking
- Premium version automatic expense and income tracking with links to your financial accounts
- Generate graphs to show your net earnings and expenses over time
- Integrates with your Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Square, and bank account
- In-app customer support from a real human
- Data can be exported from the app and sent by email
- Compare mileage tracker vs itemized expenses to save the most at year end
Downside:
- Doesn’t include major event tracking & alerts
- Doesn’t include airport flight & traffic information
- Uses a bit more data than some apps
- Some say it is slow starting but that depends on the phone
Rating: 4.8 overall
Availability: iOS and Android
Cost: Free
Features:
- Only a free version
- Extremely accurate mileage tracking
- Lightweight passive mileage tracking & Less Battery
- Very good expense tracking – file your receipts and expense records
- Walks you through which expenses can be tracked, geared towards rideshare drivers
- Only one permission to install, no collecting data other than your locations
- All your business deductions in one place
- Add your bank account & or add your expenses manually
- Stride specializes in health, vision, dental and life insurance benefits for independent contractors
Downside:
- Doesn’t automatically track mileage it’s manual, although this isn’t necessarily bad
- Advertises health, vision, life & dental insurance to you constantly (that’s why it is free)
- Doesn’t include major event tracking & alerts
- Doesn’t include airport flight & traffic information
Best All In One Mileage Tracker, Expense Tracker, Event Tracker, Airport Tracker App
Rating: 4.8 overall
Availability: iOS and Android
Cost: Free or $8.33 per month premium
Free Features:
- Tracks mileage automatically or manually
- Major event tracking & alerts up to a week ahead
- Airport flight arrival & departing passenger volume
- One app that does almost everything a rideshare driver needs
- Use less cell battery with one app
- Helps you make more income with surge, traffic, event and airport data
- Real-time look at how far you’ve driven and how long you’ve driven for the current day, the previous day, and the entire week
- View your weekly and daily results on the Earnings tab. This will include your total earnings and total number of trips given
- Shift summary email with more detailed stats
- Member benefits like car washes and insurance
- Track your earnings across Uber & Lyft
- Export mileage reports to help you with taxes
- Real-time weather notifications
Paid Features:
- 24 hour airport arrival & departure information
- Make custom airport activity alerts
- Make & set unlimited event alerts
- No Ads
- Priority Support
- Much More
Downside:
- Does not do expense tracking YET! (they will soon)
- Have had a few complaints the mileage tracker does not work sometimes
Mileage Tracking App – Accuracy Test
This test was taken from the Rideshare Guy
Odometer: 129 mi
- MileIQ: 103.6 mi
- QuickBooks Self-Employed: 129.8 mi
- Everlance (not performed)
- Hurdlr: 129 mi
- Stride: 132.51 mi
- Gridwise (not performed)
For the apps not tested we are not going to speculate how they might perform. Keep in mind this was a one time test only not using different conditions or vehicles. We do not see any major issues here with any of the apps Except Mile IQ looks out of line. If you use Microsoft 365 and want to use Mile IQ… please do some more research on it. We actually have Office 365 products and cannot verify Mile IQ is inaccurate at all.
The Final Evaluation
Remember drivers any app you pay for to help you perform better is tax deductible! So don’t be scared to spend a few dollars a month if it is going to help you make a lot more.
Gridwise stands out as the only tracker created to fulfill almost every need for rideshare drivers and it has almost everything you need with the free version to start out.
Our Recommendation at this point is to use Gridwise paid version for everything except mileage tracking and expense reporting. They claim it can help you make $300 more per week. We haven’t used Gridwise, but are about to use it combined with Stride App. Having driven Rideshare for 8 years we can verify that being in the right spots all the time will definitely boost your income. To say $300 a week seems high because many factors come into play. However it is possible and we will see how it works out and report back soon.
Gridwise collates data from APIs including: traffic services, social media, weather, events, local news and using data from drivers who use Gridwise app on their phones. 10’s of thousands of drivers use Gridwise. Alerts are compiled based on factors like airport traffic, weather conditions, locations that are busy due to major events. Also they take data from drivers using several ridesharing services such as: Uber, Lyft, Via and others.
We do not recommend using Quickbooks unless you use it for business. In this case use Stride App as it has proper map GPS images for reporting as well as the ability to manually enter trip data, which comes in handy when you forget to turn on your mileage app. Stride is free and works perfectly and you can import data from it directly into Quickbooks. Combine Gridwise with this and you have a perfect system.
We have used Stride free version for years now and love it for tracking and taxes. We will try to use Gridwise & Stride going forward and report back how it works. We will not use Gridwise for mileage tracking until we have fully vetted it works right & they are also coming out with expense tracking. If these two things come together properly then Gridwise will become our only app.
Hurdlr also seems like a great option combined with Gridwise as Hrdlr is very robust and does alot of what Quickbooks does while also having possibly more upside than Stride.
You could combine any of these with Gridwise if you think Gridwise might not be the best for tracking and you can’t go wrong.
If you are trying to save every dollar try Stride or Hurdlr free versions combined with Gridwise free. But it seems Gridwise paid will be worth the small investment.
For More Great Savings Checkout: Rideshare Driver Apps
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