REALTORS® often travel far and wide for business while spending hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a year on fuel. To aid in this discussion, some of our Missouri REALTORS® recently began a thread on Common Ground. Below, you will find some of their suggestions that you can use to best practices to help you save money as you travel.
The Classic Pen and Paper Technique:
Just as it sounds, this is the traditional way to keep track of your miles in a logbook that you can keep in your vehicle. In addition, this is the most recommended way to keep track of your mileage with 27% of respondents stating they preferred this method. When you don’t have access to technology, don’t have time to deal with technology, or simply prefer traditional methods, this is the route to go. This method was suggested by Tom Townsend, Anna Hatridge, and Tom Booth.
MileIQ:
Next is MileIQ which was suggested by Shah Smith and Jo Johnson. MileIQ is a mileage tracking app that you can easily access from your smartphone. It is regarded as the first mileage tracking app that can track your miles passively, meaning there is no need for you to calculate or log hours; the app does it for you. The only downside to MileIQ is that it costs $5.99/month or $59.99/year. However, if you’re traveling regularly, it might be worth looking into.
TripLog:
Like MileIQ, TripLog has passive logging which automatically track your miles. Unlike MileIQ, TripLog gives you the ability to manually track your miles. TripLog comes with three different plan options: Free Plan, Personal Plan, and the Business Plan. As noted above, the Free Plan is free, the Personal plan costs $1.50/month or $15.00/year, and the Business Plan costs $2.50/month or $25.00/year. Note, the automatic tracking is only available through the Personal and Business plans. This was suggested by Kimberly Cameron and Linda Trotter.
While the mileage trackers listed above seem to be the most popular, consider checking out Automatic, Speedy Log, Quickbooks, and Everlance.