It’s starting to get hot (imagine that) after a brief reprieve from the normal heat this time of year in Arizona. This month, I wanted to share with you some hot apps that can be very useful in helping you track your business expenses and business mileage. As we all know, a proper recordkeeping system established up front can help avoid many stressful hours and frayed nerves later when gathering the needed documents and information for tax return preparation. Having this information available in real time is useful in managing your business more efficiently as well throughout the year. It allows you to make needed course corrections along the way.
Some popular applications that you should consider using for tracking business mileage are Mileage Expense Log (iOS), MileIQ (Android, iOS) and TripLog (Android, iOS). Each of these apps uses the GPS function of your smartphone to track your business mileage each day and keeps a record of these miles for year-end tax return preparation purposes. You can investigate the features that each offers and decide which app works best for you.
Several my clients use Mint – an app from Intuit that helps track and organize expenses. Another similar app is Expensify. Lastly, an app that assists you in determining a value for items donated to charity is iDonatedIt (Android, iOS).
Some of the apps discussed above are free and others involve a one-time or monthly fee. After testing some of the apps for a period of time, you can determine which will work best for you and whether the price, if applicable, is worth the benefit gained by using the app.
The apps listed above are useful, but our recommendation is always to utilize a full-service accounting software such as Quickbooks to track your business activity throughout the year. Since a package such as Quickbooks allows for full tracking of your business activity, we suggest utilizing the apps listed above in conjunction with Quickbooks or whatever full-service accounting software you use.
If you have questions about business activity tracking, please contact us.