There are some important mileage recording guidelines to make note of:
- Business miles per IRS regulations exclude the number of miles driven between home and place of work (commute miles).
The distance between your home and your place of work is your commute, and the time you spend between home and work is your commuting distance. For example, if your normal round trip miles between home and the Mariani office is 20 miles, then the first 20 miles of each business day need to be excluded from your total miles driven that day. Continuing with this scenario, if you leave home, drive to a client, go into the office, drive to two more clients, and return home for a round trip of 100 miles, you should subtract out your normal commuting miles and put 80 miles on the form.
Associates that rarely come into the office, still have commuting miles, but the calculation is different – it will be the distance from your home to your first stop, and from your last stop back to your home. Please contact your manager or Gino for clarification.
For more information, please refer to this IRS publication.
- The IRS requires that you keep your mileage records contemporaneously.
“Contemporaneous” means your records are created each day you drive for business, or soon thereafter.
- If you are on a vehicle allowance program, you are required to take an odometer reading at the beginning and end of the year.
You don’t need to send this reading into accounting, but you must have it available in case of an audit.
Helpful Tips
- Your trip odometer is your friend.
At the end of the day, subtract your standard commuting miles from the trip odometer reading, and enter that onto the form.
- If you make multiple trips per day, you may enter “Various” on the form for the midpoints.
Keep in mind though, that you must have backup for the actual trips you took in case of an audit.
Auto-Save & “Remember Last Submission” Functionality
- The app will auto-save your entries while you are filling out the request.
- When you bring up the mileage app, it will pre-populate with the entries from your last submission.
Here are two examples of how you can use these features to your benefit…
Example 1: For an associate on the vehicle allowance program (e.g. you have arranged with Gino to receive a fixed reimbursement amount each month).
Let’s say you visit some of the same sites week after week. Just bring up the app every day, and keep adding trips throughout the week. At the end of the week, submit the form. When you bring up the form at the beginning of the next week, the mileage and trip descriptions for the previous week will be there and you can just add the new dates of your trips.
Example 2: You are on the mileage reimbursement plan (you receive checks from accounting to directly reimburse you for mileage you record).
If you take infrequent trips, the mileage reimbursement app will save up your entries without you needing to submit your request. So, you can use the app to record each trip as you take it, and only once you are ready to send the information to your manager and accounting, will you need to submit the form. That means:
- You don’t need to keep your track of your trips in a separate log.
- You can minimize the number of checks you receive and process
- It will save accounting time from cutting lots of checks for small dollar amounts.
To facilitate the new functionality the App was re-designed, and you will be asked up-front for the number of trips. You can increase that number as necessary.
If you want to delete all the entries from the previous time-period, you can set the # of trips down to 1, which will wipe out the pre-filled entries. Then can change the number of trips back to a higher number.