Milometry vs a spreadsheet

The honest case for a spreadsheet

Most people tracking business mileage are not using an app. They are using a spreadsheet, or a notebook in the glovebox, and in a lot of cases they should carry on.

It is free, and it will stay free. No subscription, no purchase, no company that might be sold or shut down. A spreadsheet you made in 2019 still opens.

It goes anywhere. Every tax authority in the world accepts a clear record of dates, places, distances and purpose. HMRC asks the self employed to keep records of what they spent and earned, with the receipts to back it. Japan has no national mileage rate at all, so the self employed apportion actual car costs by the business share of distance, and the standard advice is a 車両使用記録簿 kept in Excel. In the Netherlands and Germany the bar for the strictest cases is higher than a spreadsheet, but for ordinary business travel a clear record is a clear record.

It does exactly what you tell it. Odd rate, unusual apportionment, a column for the client you visited: a spreadsheet bends. Apps have opinions.

You own the file. Which is a thing we say about ourselves too, and it is just as true of a .xlsx on your laptop.

If your driving is occasional, a spreadsheet is genuinely the right answer and we would rather tell you that than sell you something.

The one thing it cannot do

A spreadsheet cannot notice.

Every mileage record built by hand has the same failure, and it is not arithmetic. It is the Tuesday you drove to a client, meant to write it down at the end of the day, and did not. Then the Wednesday. Then a fortnight later you are reconstructing a month from your calendar, your bank statements and your memory, and the number you put in the box is a guess wearing a suit.

That guess is the actual cost. Not the price of an app: the miles you never claimed because you could not prove them, and the miles you did claim that you could not substantiate if anyone asked.

Milometry exists for that one problem. It notices you drove, records the route, and has the trip waiting to be sorted. You are never reconstructing anything, because it was written down while it was happening.

What else you get for the price

The arithmetic is done and kept current. Bands, thresholds and the tax year for your country, applied as you drive. A spreadsheet has whatever rate you typed into it the year you built it, which is exactly how people end up claiming at a rate that changed two budgets ago.

Fuel against real economy. Log a fill up and journeys are costed against what your car actually does, rather than the brochure figure or a guess.

It sorts itself. Regular places learn which category they belong to, so the sorting becomes a swipe and then mostly nothing.

Export when you need it. CSV and a PDF statement, which is the spreadsheet you would have built, produced from records that were captured rather than remembered.

Where a spreadsheet still wins

Cost, if the app is not worth it to you. Free is free.

Strict compliance regimes. In Germany a Fahrtenbuch for a company car has to be tamper proof, and in the Netherlands a sluitende rittenregistratie has to be unalterable. A spreadsheet fails those, and so do we. Both of those need a certified system with hardware, and our pages on Vimcar, AutoLogg and Cartracker say so.

Anything unusual. Multi vehicle apportionment, a scheme nobody else uses, a format your accountant insists on. A spreadsheet does whatever you can type.

No phone involved. If you would rather not have an app running in the background at all, that is a coherent position and a spreadsheet respects it.

Which one you should pick

Keep the spreadsheet if you drive for work occasionally, if you enjoy the control, or if your situation is odd enough that no app models it properly.

Get Milometry if the honest problem is that you keep forgetting, and the mileage you lose to forgetting is worth more than the app.

Claim figures are estimates, not tax advice.