In this buyer’s guide, we provide you with the information that you need to select the best mileage tracker app for your business. We looked at the most popular options and rising stars in this area and decided on MileIQ, TripLog, and QuickBooks Self-Employed. These companies cover the range for small businesses in terms of price, features, and reporting options. Read on for our comparison and review of these three options, as well as our top recommendations.

Best Mileage Tracker App for Small Businesses on a Budget: MileIQ

We recommend MileIQ for small businesses on a budget. With a price tag of Free, it is an economical solution for the self employed and entrepreneurs who periodically use their vehicle for business. MileIQ is easy to use and will automatically detect drives so you don’t have to remember to start the app before heading to a client’s office.

Visit MileIQ

Best Mileage Tracker App for Small Businesses with a Sales Team: TripLog

TripLog is a great solution for small businesses with a team of employees, contractors, or sales reps who use their personal vehicles to travel for business. TripLog allows you to set up an unlimited number of drivers so that all of the mileage is consolidated in the company dashboard to make it easy to review and approve mileage for reimbursement.

Visit TripLog

Best All in One Mileage Tracker App: QuickBooks Self-Employed

We recommend QuickBooks Self-Employed for small businesses that want more from a mileage tracker app. This doubles as a mileage tracker that will keep track of all of the miles you travel for business and an accounting software program that will track your income and expenses.

Visit QuickBooks Self-Employed

Best Mileage Tracker App Comparison Table: MileIQ vs. TripLog vs. QuickBooks Self-Employed

	MileIQ	TripLog	QuickBooks Self-Employed
Price of Recommended Plan Learn More	Free - 40 drives / month	$5 /driver / mo. - up to 100 drivers $4.50/driver/mo. - 101 to 1000 drivers $4.00/driver/mo. - over 1000 drivers	$17 / mo. (no limit on number of drives)
Ease of Use Learn More	Easy	Easy	Easy
Mileage Reporting Options Learn More	Detailed reports available in CSV and PDF format Email notifications can be set up so reports are automatically delivered to your inbox	Detailed reports available in HTML, CSV and PDF format Email notifications can be set up so reports are automatically delivered to your inbox	Detailed reports available in CSV format Email notifications can be set up so reports are automatically delivered to your inbox
Manual or Auto Detection Learn More	Automatic drive capture	Automatic drive capture or Manually start/stop the app for each trip.	Automatic drive capture or Manually start/stop the app for each trip
Track Trip-Related Income and Expenses? Learn More	No	Tracks all expenses like gas, tolls, hotel and meals	Tracks all income and expenses like gas, tolls, hotel and meals
Employee Reimbursement Learn More	Manual	Integrated with the mileage tracker	Integrated with the mileage tracker
Integrations Learn More	Freshbooks, Concur	QuickBooks, Concur	TurboTax, MileIQ
Customer Support Learn More	Help center or email; No telephone support	Help center or email; No telephone support	Help center or email; No telephone support
Data Storage Learn More	Automatic secure cloud storage	Automatic secure cloud storage	Automatic secure cloud storage
Platform Learn More	iOS and Android	iOS and Android	iOS and Android
	www.MileIQ.com	www.TripLogMileage.com	www.QuickBooks.com

Best Mileage Tracker App for Small Businesses on a Budget: MileIQ

MileIQ is the best mileage app tracker for small business owners on a budget who periodically need to track their mileage. It has an excellent free plan.

We recommend MileIQ for your small business if you:

Are a solopreneur, freelancer, or self-employed
Need to track fewer than 40 drives (trips) per month
Track your income and expenses using an accounting software program like QuickBooks

MileIQ has an automatic drive capture feature that uses features in your phone to determine when you have started driving. This is so that you don’t have to remember to start/stop your trips manually. Similar to TripLog and QuickBooks Self-Employed, you can easily categorize trips as either business or personal. MileIQ also includes a feature called work hours. To activate this feature, you simply enter the hours that you typically are driving for business (i.e. work). MileIQ will automatically classify all trips during work hours as business. By the same token, all trips outside of work hours will be classified as personal.

MileIQ also provides a ton of robust features that you would want in a mileage tracker app for absolutely free! For example, MileIQ integrates with programs like FreshBooks, Concur, and QuickBooks, which allows you to export your mileage data to ensure your financial records are always up-to-date. MileIQ also offers robust reporting features that will deliver reports right to your inbox as often as you like.

If you use more than one vehicle for business, you can track mileage for multiple vehicles.

One of the downsides to using MileIQ is that you cannot track other vehicle expenses, such as parking or gasoline purchases whereas both TripLog and QuickBooks Self-Employed allow you to track expenses. MileIQ also does not track income like QuickBooks Self-Employed does.

Another disadvantage of using MileIQ is that you are limited to 40 drives per month in their free plan. If you do more business trips than that, consider upgrading to their Unlimited plan which you can purchase for $5.99 per month. I also recommend that you keep reading to learn more about TripLog. They have an unlimited plan with a lot more features for only $4.00 per month.

Visit MileIQ

Best Mileage Tracker App for Small Businesses with a Sales Team: TripLog

TripLog is the best mileage app tracker for small businesses that need to keep track of mileage and other expenses for a team of people:

We recommend TripLog for your small business if you:

Have employees or contractors that you reimburse for mileage
Have employees or contractors that you need to reimburse for other expenses like gas, parking, meals, or hotel stays
Need the ability to run consolidated vehicle mileage reports for all drivers

Unlike MileIQ, there are several features TripLog has to make it easy to manage teams. For example, TripLog has an Approval Management component that allows employees to submit trips for reimbursement and it allows supervisors to easily review/approve/deny those trips. If approved, the accounting administrator can schedule them for payment. The robust features that TripLog offers makes it worth paying for since it will save both you and your team time that would normally be spent manually tracking miles and submitting expense reports separately for review and payment.

In addition to mileage, TripLog has the ability to keep track of other reimbursable business expenses like meals and hotel stays. These expenses can be tracked by taking a photo of the receipt or just by clicking an ‘add business expenses’ button in the app and completing a few fields of information.

Similar to MileIQ, TripLog also integrates with Concur and QuickBooks so that your accounting records remain up-to-date.

One disadvantage to TripLog is that it will take a bit longer than MileIQ to get your team up and running. The person who will be the administrator must set up the features that will be used by drivers who access the app. However, this is a one-time setup process unless you decide to turn on/off features in the future. To learn more details about setting up each of the features, read on.

Visit TripLog

Best All In One Mileage Tracker & Accounting Software: QuickBooks Self-Employed

QuickBooks Self-Employed is the best “all in one” mileage tracker app for small businesses. In addition to keeping track of your mileage, this app doubles as accounting software. Our recommended plan (TurboTax bundle) tracks your income and expenses through the app and transfers all of your data to Schedule C through TurboTax to prepare your tax return at tax time.

We recommend QuickBooks Self-Employed for your small business if you:

Are self-employed and required to file a Schedule C with your tax return
Need a way to track all of your income and expenses
Need to track mileage and other vehicle expenses

QuickBooks Self-Employed is really an accounting software with a built-in mileage app. It was designed for freelancers, independent contractors (e.g. Uber/Lyft drivers), and solopreneurs.

Since the mileage tracker is already integrated into QuickBooks Self-Employed, there is no setup or transfer of data require. Your mileage, income, and expense info will automatically be transferred to your Schedule C if you use TurboTax tax preparation software. With MileIQ and TripLog, you will have to export your data to a CSV file and manually prepare your Schedule C for tax purposes.

QuickBooks Self-Employed allows you to create customer invoices and receive customer payments to keep track of your income. MileIQ and TripLog do not offer this ability. Similar to TripLog, QuickBooks Self-Employed also allows you to keep track of all of your business expenses and not just for mileage and vehicle. This makes it a great all-in-one solution.

QuickBooks Self-Employed provides you access to mileage reports as well as your profit and loss statement and tax detail and summary reports. Real time information on business profit and spending as well as bank and credit card balances is readily available on the dashboard of QuickBooks Self-Employed.

One disadvantage to QuickBooks Self-Employed is that the price is significantly higher ($17/mo.) than both MileIQ (FREE) and TripLog ($4.00/driver/month). This is largely due to the fact that QuickBooks Self-Employed offers mileage tracking, accounting software, and tax software in one bundle.

Visit QuickBooks Self-Employed

In-Depth Review: MileIQ vs. TripLog vs. QuickBooks Self-Employed

Pricing

While the three companies that we chose vary greatly when it comes to price, we are confident that one of our top picks will offer the features you are looking for at a price that you can afford. MileIQ is our budget friendly company with their free plan while TripLog costs $4/driver per month for their fleet plan for teams of 1-100. QuickBooks Self-Employed is at the high-end with a cost of $17/month for their TurboTax Bundle.

	MileIQ	TripLog	QuickBooks Self-Employed
Price and Recommended Plan	Free - Limited plan Includes 40 drives/month	$5/driver/mo. - Enterprise plan Includes 1- 100 drivers & and an unlimited # of users	$17/mo. - TurboTax Bundle Includes unlimited drives

The MileIQ free plan is limited to 40 drives per month. This is a great plan for a solopreneur who does not have to travel to customers that often but would like an easy way to keep track of those miles driven for the vehicle tax deduction. In addition to the Limited plan, MileIQ offers a monthly plan at $5.99 per month. Unlike the limited plan, it includes an unlimited number of drives per month. If you prefer to pay for the year upfront, the annual plan is $59.99 per month which will save you about $12 per year.

The Enterprise edition of TripLog is $4 per driver per month up to 100 drivers. This is a great plan for a small business that has employees, contractors, or sales reps who spend most of their time out in the field with clients.

TripLog allows you to set up each driver so that they can start tracking their miles using the TripLog app. This will save them a lot of time that they used to spend manually writing down this information in a log book. It will also ensure that trips are not missed because they were not written down.

Similar to MileIQ, TripLog does offer a free plan. It is limited to one driver and does not have the features that the Enterprise edition offers, like tracking business meals and hotels. It also does not integrate with QuickBooks and Concur like the Enterprise edition of TripLog does.

QuickBooks Self-Employed is at the high end of the price range at $17/month. However, you get a lot more than just a mileage tracker for your money. If you are looking for a way to keep track of all of your income and expenses as well as a solution to make tax time a breeze then you should definitely consider QuickBooks Self-Employed.

If the price tag is too steep, then you might want to look at the standard QuickBooks Self-Employed edition which is $10 per month. The primary differences between our recommended version and the standard edition is the TurboTax bundle includes the TurboTax software to do your taxes and the ability to export your data to Schedule C. Also, the e-filing fees for federal and the state returns do not come with the Standard edition.

Ease of Use

MileIQ, TripLog, and QuickBooks Self-Employed are very easy to use. I had never used a mileage tracker app before writing this guide, but after downloading each app, I explored all of the menu options which are very intuitive and I was able to figure out most things. If I couldn’t quite figure something out on my own, I searched the extensive knowledgebase articles that each app offers and was able to figure things out from there.

Above is a screenshot of the dashboard in MileIQ along with a brief description of the key fields.

Date Range – Select the date range you would like to see mileage activity for.
Total Miles – This shows the total number of miles driven based on the date or date range selected.
Business Miles – This is the total number of miles that have been classified as business miles.
Drives Taken – This area shows the details (time, where, miles, value) of each drive taken for the time period selected.
Purpose – In this column, you can select the purpose of the trip. Beneath each of the primary categories (Business and Personal), there are several subcategories to choose from. If there are additional categories you would like to add to expand the description for your drives, you can do that here as well.

Above is a screenshot of the dashboard in TripLog along with a brief description of some of the key fields.

Date of Trip – Select a date or date range that you want to view activity for.
From/To – Specify where the trip began and ended.
Beginning Odometer – When you set up your app, you can determine if you want to track miles using the beginning and ending odometer readings or the total miles driven in the next field.
Mileage – Total number of miles for this trip.
Activity – Select from a list of Business or Personal options
Tags – You can use this to further define the purpose of the trip (i.e. errand, client visit, etc.)
Notes – Enter additional info about the trip.
Parking – Enter any parking fees that you paid during this trip.
Tolls – Enter any toll fees paid during this trip.
Create to save the trip details.

QuickBooks Self-Employed Mileage App Dashboard

Above is a screenshot of the dashboard in QuickBooks Self-Employed along with a brief description of the key fields.

Miles Driven – This is the total number of miles driven for the time frame selected.
Mileage Deduction – This is the estimated mileage deduction that QuickBooks Self-Employed has calculated based on the total miles driven (in this example, it is calculated by multiplying 17 miles times the 2016 mileage deduction rate of 54 cents).
Trip Details – This section lists the details of each trip taken, including the date, location, distance, and potential deduction which is the distance times the 2016 mileage rate of 54 cents.
Type of Expense – Select either Business or Personal. Another field will display that will allow you to type a brief description of the purpose of the trip.

Reporting

One of the benefits of using a mileage tracker app is to be able to provide detailed log reports that are required by the IRS to support your vehicle tax deduction. Another benefit is to have the ability to run reports for a specific time period like a month or a week to look at various trends for multiple drivers or just yourself. All 3 companies offer several options when it comes to summarized reports.

Below is a snapshot of a PDF report from MileIQ. You can download reports in CSV format as well.

TripLog: Below is a snapshot of a sample Daily Trip Summary and Daily Trip Log that you can download as an Excel or PDF document in TripLog.

Below is a snapshot of a CSV report downloaded from QuickBooks Self-Employed. While this report is not as nicely formatted as the reports in MileIQ, you can easily make adjustments to it since it is in an Excel format.

Manual vs. Auto Trip Detection

One of the features all three companies offer is the ability to auto detect when you have started a trip (i.e. drive). The app uses features that are built into your phone like GPS, miles per hour, bluetooth, and Wi-Fi to be able to do this accurately. The downside to using the auto detect feature is that it can drain your battery. We will also discuss a few other options that aren’t quite as taxing on your cellphone battery.

All three apps also let you track mileage on multiple vehicles if you drive multiple vehicles for business.

Once you have downloaded the app and created an account, you are ready to take your first drive. MileIQ is automatically setup to auto detect your drives. There are no manual start and stop options currently available. However, you can turn off auto detect if you are going to take a drive (e.g. for personal reasons, like a trip to the grocery store) and you don’t want it to “count.” Just don’t forget to turn it back on when you are ready to keep track again. If you do forget to log a trip because you did not have auto detect turned on, you can manually enter past trips directly into MileIQ. Refer to the Ease of Use section for more info on how to do this.

TripLog offers four tracking mode options:

Fully automated – Also called Magic Trip, this option will track any movement so that you don’t miss any miles and it is the default for TripLog. On the downside, it will also drain your battery more than both the semi automated and the manual options.
Semi automated (Bluetooth plus speed over threshold) – This option combines using a Bluetooth device plus selecting a speed over threshold option. In general, tracking will begin when you connect your phone to a bluetooth device (like your car) and then go over a certain speed, like 5mph.
Semi automated (Plug into power and speed over threshold) – This option requires you to plug in your phone into a power source, like your car charger and then go over a certain speed, like 5mph.
Manual – This option will disable auto detect and then you will have to select start trip and stop trip as you drive. If you forget to start a trip before you start driving or you forgot to stop a trip once you have reached your destination, then you can manually enter the missing start/stop info into TripLog.

QuickBooks Self-Employed just offers automatic detection or manual start/stop. The default setting is automatic detection. If you forget to turn auto detection back on, you can manually enter trips directly into QuickBooks Self-Employed like you can for both MileIQ and TripLog.

Track Income and Expenses

When it comes to tracking expenses, only 2 out of the 3 companies that we selected have this capability. Both TripLog and QuickBooks Self-Employed have the capability to track your expenses. Unfortunately MileIQ does not. Only QuickBooks Self-Employed lets you track income.

As mentioned, MileIQ does not have the ability to track expenses.

TripLog allows you to track all business expenses. This includes but is not limited to gas, tolls, parking, hotels and meals. You can enter the expenses directly from your phone using the app or you can log into the website to track your expenses.

Since QuickBooks Self-Employed is an accounting software program, it makes sense that you can record all of your business income and business expenses like gas, tolls, parking, hotels and meals. There are two ways to enter business expenses into QuickBooks Self-Employed:

Connect your bank and credit card accounts to QuickBooks Self-Employed so that all of your transactions will automatically import.
Manually enter expenses into QuickBooks Self-Employed using the app, like you can for TripLog or log into your QuickBooks Self-Employed account from your computer and track expenses that way.

Employee Reimbursement

A mileage app tracker should make it easy to reimburse employees and contractors for the miles they have driven their personal cars for business. Both QuickBooks Self-Employed and TripLog have built-in functionality that makes reimbursing employees a no brainer. Unfortunately MileIQ does not have this built-in functionality you can run reports that will provide you with the info you need to reimburse employees.

The free version of MileIQ is for a single driver. Therefore, it does not have any built-in functionality to review and approve miles for reimbursement like MileIQ. However, the detailed reports provide you with enough info so that you can reimburse your employee by manually writing a check or creating a check with an accounting software program like QuickBooks.

TripLog was built for businesses with small and large teams that need to track miles and expenses so that they can quickly be reimbursed. The Approval Management component allows employees to submit trips for reimbursement using the mobile app or on the website. Once the trips have been submitted, the supervisor can easily review & approve those trips for payment.

With QuickBooks Self-Employed, the mileage app is integrated with the accounting software. This makes it pretty easy to transfer the miles to a check or bill form in QuickBooks so that you can quickly reimburse your employees. While QuickBooks does not have all of the bells and whistles that TripLog offers with its approval management system, it accomplishes the same goal of getting your employees reimbursed quickly.

Integrations

Integration with other programs was another key feature that we thought was important for a mileage tracker app. All three companies are compatible with QuickBooks, which is our recommended accounting software for small businesses. If you want to learn more about QuickBooks Online, check out our free QuickBooks Online course.

MileIQ can be setup to send mileage expenses to invoice creation software FreshBooks so that you can include them on your customer invoices to get reimbursed.

Concur also integrates with MileIQ so that you can send mileage expenses to your expense reports in Concur. Concur is a system that tracks expenses and makes it easy to reimburse employees for mileage and other out of pocket expenses.

TripLog integrates with Concur and QuickBooks. TripLog uploads trips, parking, fuel and other business expenses to your Concur account.

You can upload trips, parking, fuel, and other business expenses to QuickBooks Online Plus. TripLog uploads mileage reimbursement that you owe to your employees or sales reps as bills. Mileage reimbursement that is owed to you by your customers are uploaded as invoices.

Since the mileage tracker is built into the QuickBooks Self-Employed software, it is automatically integrated with QuickBooks. If you are currently using the MileIQ app and you want to switch to QuickBooks Self-Employed, you can download your MileIQ data to a CSV format file and use the Import MileIQ trips option in QuickBooks Self-Employed to import your data. Once the import is complete, then you are ready to track your miles with QuickBooks Self-Employed. This option to import historical driving miles is not available for MileIQ or TripLog. However, you can manually add trips to all 3 apps.

Customer Support

When it comes to customer support, all three of these companies rely heavily on an extensive Help Center that includes articles with step by step instructions and some screenshots. They cover topics ranging from how to get up and running to troubleshooting issues. On each website is an email address for support questions but there is no indication on what the response time would be. In addition, there is no telephone number on any of the websites which I’m assuming is by design.

In my opinion, I think a company should always give their customers an option to communicate with a live person whether it is via telephone or a chat portal. However, I had never used a mileage app tracker before but I was able to download all 3 apps and set up an account without an issue.

MileIQ: You can access MileIQ Help Center or submit a support ticket directly on their website.

TripLog: You can access the TripLog Help Center or submit a support ticket directly on their website.

QuickBooks Self-Employed: You can access the QuickBooks Self-Employed Help Center or submit a support ticket directly on their website.

Data Backup

It’s important that you have a written record that supports any deductions you have claimed on your tax returns. Our 3 picks provide secure online cloud storage.

MileIQ guarantees that your driving history is secure and available whenever you need it. You can access them anytime you need them with your secure user id and password.

TripLog ensures that your driving history and receipts you have uploaded are safe and secure. Anyone who needs to access your data must have a user id and password.

QuickBooks Self-Employed: Similar to MileIQ and TripLog, your data is securely stored online and cannot be accessed without the proper user id and password information.

Platform

During our research, we found several mileage trackers that were only available on the iOS platform. We thought it was important that the companies that made our cut were not limited to just one platform (iOS or Android). All three companies are available on both iOS and Android platforms.

MileIQ: Click here to download the iOS or Android version of the MileIQ app.

TripLog: Click here to download the iOS or Android version of the TripLog app.

In addition to being compatible with iOS and Android devices, QuickBooks Self-Employed is also compatible with Windows devices.

All Mileage Tracker App Options

While MileIQ, TripLog and QuickBooks Self-Employed offer a wide range of options for small to medium sized businesses, we wanted to share the full list of products that we considered.

Product	Best For	Description
MileIQ	Small Businesses on a budget	This free mileage tracker is great for businesses who periodically need to keep track of miles driven.
TripLog	Small Businesses with a sales team	This robust system allows you to set up multiple drivers who need to submit expense reports to be reimbursed for miles driven and other expenses like parking fees, hotel and meals.
QuickBooks Self-Employed	Small Businesses who are in the market for an accounting solution	This app not only allows you to track miles driven but you can track all business income and expenses and it will even transfer all of your data over to Schedule C for easy tax filing.
Everlance	Uber / Lyft drivers, Real estate agents, Freelancers who need to keep track of miles driven for business.	A free mileage tracker app that works great if you don’t mind having to manually start and stop the app for each trip. It is compatible with iOS and Android devices.
TaxMileage	Contractors who need to submit expense reports to multiple clients for reimbursement.	This app is great for tracking mileage for expense reports.You can add multiple vehicles and different companies. It is only compatible with iOS devices.

The Bottom Line

By now I’m sure you will agree that with all of the mileage tracker apps available it is a lot less complicated to keep track of miles driven and other expenses than it used to be. This will ensure that you do not miss logging a trip so that you can take advantage of all of the tax deductions that you have earned.

If you are in the market for an accounting software package, we recommend that you give QuickBooks a try. We use it for all of our bookkeeping needs and it is the accounting software that we recommend for small businesses. Be sure to check out the free QuickBooks Online course that we created. It will get you up and running with QuickBooks in no time!

Visit QuickBooks

Comments (2) Post Your Comment

Tory Tipp

June 11, 2017 at 12:44 pm

Great fair and unbiased reviews. I found the information to be very helpful. QuickBooks self-employed is the most expensive of the three but I feel well worth the money.

- Crystalynn Shelton
  
  June 12, 2017 at 3:25 pm
  
  Hi Tory, thanks so much for weighing in. Glad you found the info useful.
  
  All the Best-
  Crystalynn

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Crystalynn Shelton

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Best Mileage Tracker App for Small Businesses on a Budget: MileIQ

Best Mileage Tracker App for Small Businesses with a Sales Team: TripLog

Best All in One Mileage Tracker App: QuickBooks Self-Employed

Best Mileage Tracker App Comparison Table: MileIQ vs. TripLog vs. QuickBooks Self-Employed

Best Mileage Tracker App for Small Businesses on a Budget: MileIQ

Best Mileage Tracker App for Small Businesses with a Sales Team: TripLog

Best All In One Mileage Tracker & Accounting Software: QuickBooks Self-Employed

In-Depth Review: MileIQ vs. TripLog vs. QuickBooks Self-Employed

Pricing

Ease of Use

Reporting

Manual vs. Auto Trip Detection

Track Income and Expenses

Employee Reimbursement

Integrations

Customer Support

Data Backup

Platform

All Mileage Tracker App Options

The Bottom Line

About the Author

Crystalynn Shelton

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