Mileage Tracker: Trips With the Detail a Log Needs

What a mileage log has to contain

IRS Publication 463 asks for four things per business use of a car: the mileage, the date, your business destination, and the business purpose — plus the total miles driven for the year.

ReceGuard records all of them, and adds the vehicle, which matters the moment there is more than one car in the household. Odometer readings are optional but supported, because they are the simplest way to produce the annual total the form asks for.

GPS or by hand

Start tracking when you pull away and stop when you arrive, and the distance is measured for you. The route stays on the device.

Or enter the trip manually, which is usually faster for a drive you make every week. Either way the purpose is yours to write, because it is the field that decides whether the deduction holds up and the only one no sensor can produce. "Site survey, Alder kitchen quote" is a record. "Client" is not.

2026 has two rates

The IRS changed the business rate mid-year for 2026, which it does occasionally when fuel costs move sharply. That makes the trip date matter more than usual.

Because trips are stored with their dates rather than as an annual total, the right rate is applied to each one. A tool that keeps only a yearly figure cannot split the year correctly, and a blended rate is a number that appears nowhere in the IRS tables.

Trips and receipts together

A single client visit can produce a trip, a parking ticket, a toll and a coffee, each landing on a different line of a tax form. Keeping the mileage log beside the receipts means the whole job is in one place when someone asks what the day cost.