Mileage & Cost Tracker

What this tool does

CM8-348 is a journey-by-journey mileage log that works out what to reimburse. You record each trip, what it was for and either a pair of odometer readings or a distance. It separates business travel from commuting and private use, applies your standard rate up to an annual threshold per driver and a lower rate above it, adds passenger payments and out-of-pocket extras, and prints a claim you can hand to whoever pays it.

Everything runs inside this single file — no account, no upload, no network request of any kind. A mileage log is a record of where named people were on given days, which is personal data of a kind most businesses would rather not put on somebody else's server.

What one row is

One row is one journey: one start, one end, one purpose. A day of three deliveries from the depot and back is one row if you drove a single round trip, and three rows if each was a separate departure. Split a trip whenever the purpose changes — a drive to a customer that carries on to a private appointment is two rows, because only the first is reimbursable.

Record commuting and private journeys as well. They are not reimbursable and the tool does not pay them, but a log that only contains business trips cannot be reconciled against an odometer, and a log that cannot be reconciled is the first thing an auditor pulls at.

Where the distance comes from

Two ways, and the tool prefers the first:

Odometer readings are better than an entered distance for one reason: consecutive journeys chain together, so a gap in the log shows up as a jump in the readings. An entered distance from a route planner is fine when nobody read the odometer, and the sample log includes one so you can see how it behaves — but the route planner's distance is the route it would have chosen, not the one that was driven.

The tool will not accept one odometer reading without the other, and will not accept a closing reading below the opening one.

Purpose, and what is reimbursable

Four purposes are treated as reimbursable — business, site to site, customer or supplier visit, and delivery or collection. Two are not: ordinary commuting and private use.

That split is the common case across most countries, not a rule from any of them. The distinction that causes the most argument is between a commute and a business journey when somebody travels straight from home: in many places, travel from home to a temporary workplace is business travel while travel to a permanent one is not. The tool cannot judge that for you, and the purpose you choose is the purpose it uses.

The rate, and the annual threshold

Many countries pay one rate up to a set distance each year, per driver, and a lower rate after that. Set all three figures in Settings and the tool splits each journey across the boundary:

A journey straddling the threshold is split, not rounded to one side. Set the threshold to zero if a single rate applies to you, and the lower rate is then ignored entirely.

The year is the calendar year of the journey date. If your tax year runs to a different date, the totals here will not line up with it — that is a real limitation and worth knowing before you use these figures for anything official.

Why the order of journeys matters

Because the rate depends on how far a driver has already gone, each journey is costed against the distance recorded before it: earlier dates first, and for two journeys on the same day, in the order they were entered. Add a forgotten journey from three months ago and the ones after it may recalculate, which is correct — the threshold moved.

This also means a partial log understates the threshold effect. If half the year's journeys were never entered, the tool will happily pay everything at the standard rate, because as far as it knows the driver never reached the boundary.

Passengers and extras

Where you pay something for carrying colleagues, set a rate per passenger per unit of distance in Settings:

Extras — tolls, parking, ferries, congestion charges — are entered per journey and reimbursed in full. They are shown as their own column in the claim table so nobody has to unpick them from the mileage. Do not put fuel here: fuel is already inside the mileage rate, and putting it in extras pays for it twice.

The fuel estimate

The fuel column is an estimate of what the driving actually cost in fuel or energy, which is a different question from what you reimburse:

Express the efficiency and the price in the same unit — kilometres per litre with a price per litre, miles per gallon with a price per gallon, distance per kWh with a price per kWh. Mixing them is the one error this calculation invites, and it produces a number that looks plausible and is wrong by a factor of four.

The vehicle chart shows reimbursement and fuel as separate bars rather than a total, because adding them would double-count: a mileage rate is meant to cover fuel among other things.

Running a claim

Tick already claimed once a journey has gone into a submitted claim. The outstanding table then shows only what has not been paid, oldest first, and the tile tells you what it is worth. A monthly routine is: filter to the month, print the report, submit it, then tick the journeys.

What makes a record stand up

A mileage record that will survive a question has four things in it: the date, the start and end points named properly, the reason for the journey, and the distance. "Customer visit" is not a reason; "Customer site, Rochdale — commissioning visit" is. The from and to fields are required for exactly this reason, and the notes field is where the detail belongs when the reason is not obvious from the route.

Record journeys as they happen, or at worst the same week. A log reconstructed at the end of the year from a diary is worth very little, and everybody can tell when one has been.

Printing and sharing

The Report tab prints the tiles, charts and both tables with a title block you fill in. Filter to one driver or one month first if that is what the claim covers — the report follows the filter.

Saving your work

The log is held in this browser, on this computer, and stays there between visits. Use the backup button to write a JSON file you control; that file is the only copy that survives clearing browsing data or moving to a new machine. The spreadsheet download gives you the same rows for payroll or expenses.

Accuracy & disclaimer

The rates, the threshold and the definition of a business journey are yours to set from an authoritative source for your country, and they change. This tool applies the arithmetic and nothing else: it does not know your tax year, it does not know which journeys qualify, and a total shown here is not a figure any authority has agreed to.