Apps We Use (and Love!) - Trip Cubby

Another new feature on BxB: Apps We Use (and Love!). Every few weeks somebody from team BitMethod will be offering up a feature on apps that we’re using in the real world and really appreciate. Igor is up first with an iPhone app review, though we’ll also be featuring web and maybe even desktop applications as well.

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This one is for all the road warriors out there. After trying to figure out the best possible mileage tracking system (for a while, nothing beat a notebook and a pencil in the car), two years ago I stumbled upon a better solution: Trip Cubby. Trip Cubby allows you to keep track of the miles that you drive in your car that you can deduct from your taxes or get reimbursed for.

Trip Cubby makes it easy to collect all of the needed data and get the data out of the software into an easily digestible file format you can pass on to your accountant at the end of the year or the HR department when it’s time to get expenses reimbursed.

Say I have a sales appointment across town and have to drive there in my Yugo 65e (in almost perfect condition with only 234,508 miles [$500 to a good home])…Trip Cubby only needs three pieces of information.

1. The purpose of the trip. I usually enter a short description about who I’m meeting and what for.
2. The destination, which is usually the name of the company or restaurant where the meeting is being held.
3. The odometer readings at the start and end of my trip. This is made easier by the fact that the app remembers the odometer-end entry from the previous trip that you’ve recorded.

Done! It automatically dates the entry and adds it to the list of previous entries. It will let you export this list as a nice little spreadsheet — just imagine all the possibilities with that data.

This is just scratching the surface. You can setup frequent trips you take to make entering the information even faster. Say you have a client that you drive to from your office four times a week and don’t want to have to renter every time. Setup a frequent trip and select it when you are creating a new entry, adjust the mileage if it’s off, and you are done.

The app will also let you tag individual entries, which makes it easy to export mileage based on a particular tag. Say you want to differentiate between a sales and a support trip, or you are working for two divisions in a company and they require you to submit mileage based on the division that you did the work for. Tag the entry with the appropriate tag, and voila! — you have two sets of entries that you can use to generate the report from.

I could easily write another five paragraphs about everything the app will let you do to track this information, but instead I’ll just throw this data out there: last year I put 3,582.39 miles on that Yugo. The current rate the IRS will let you deduct from your taxes is $0.50/mile for business travel. The app paid for itself after the first 10 miles. Go ahead and get it (iTunes Link) for yourself.