Best Mileage Tracking App for Delivery and Rideshare Drivers

As a rideshare driver, you’ve likely signed up for Uber and Lyft. Or if you’re a delivery driver, you may be on the Uber Eats or DoorDash platforms. Either way, at some point, you’ve probably wondered if tracking your mileage is worth it and which mileage tracking app can help you do this easily. 

Here, we’ll cover the importance of mileage tracking, explain how mileage tracking apps work, and how you can find the best mileage tracking app for delivery and rideshare drivers.

You should track your mileage as a gig driver

Mileage is typically the largest tax deduction you can claim as a gig driver (especially if you drive a car). More on that and other tax deductions for gig drivers here.

There are two main advantages to tracking your mileage with an app:

• It enables you to claim vehicle expenses on your tax return.
• It saves you a lot of time compared to keeping a manual log.

Several gig companies will provide you with a mileage estimate, but that’s only for the mileage between pickup and delivery/dropoff. 

All your other driving is for a business purpose too, and as a result is tax deductible.

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How mileage tracking apps work 

Apps (as opposed to hardware you’d install in your car) use your smartphone's GPS to track movement and record the route and distance covered. These days, tracking can be fully automated with two popular ways of initiating it:

• Based on your phone’s metrics for your acceleration and speed, or
• Based on a trigger signal from a device already placed in your vehicle, typically a low-energy Bluetooth device.

Both of these methods effectively automate your mileage tracking, but there can still be complications you might need to be aware of:

• Different apps have different settings or rules for interpreting your movement and turning that into your mileage log. For example, some apps might stop a trip after just a few minutes of you not moving, while others can be more intelligent about it. Depending on your driving habits, this means you can end up with fewer or more trips logged than you’d want.
• Using your phone’s metrics for motion without something else to trigger the app to start tracking might result in you losing out on a bit of mileage in the beginning of trips because the app sometimes starts late.

How to find the best mileage tracking apps

To find the best mileage tracking apps, you might want to stick to searching in App Store and Google Play. Look at reviews and possibly try out a few before making a final decision.

Step by step:

1: Go to the Apple App Store if you have an iPhone or Google Play if you have an Android.
2: Search for "mileage tracker."
3: Look at the ratings and the reviews first. Then confirm that the app is CRA-compliant. 
4: Download and test. Most of these apps offer a free trial or some sort of freemium model.

Keep in mind that there’s no such thing as a completely free mileage tracker. At the end of the day, they’re all paid. You should expect to pay for a monthly or yearly subscription to unlock all the features needed for your mileage logging.

The Driversnote app

As a rideshare driver or delivery driver, if you keep the Driversnote mileage tracking app on in the background while driving, you’ll be able to maximize your mileage claim when tax time rolls around—without having to spend countless hours getting your mileage log in order.

Besides our app (which is free to try), we also produced an iBeacon: A small device that you put in your vehicle which will trigger tracking to start and stop automatically. See the iBeacon here and read more about our app here.

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