Are you driving for professional purposes? Are you a business owner or employee dealing with drive tracking? MileCatcher might be an interesting solution for you to finally get rid of the dusty mileage book. Interested in a little innovation to save you money and time? We reviewed the MileCatcher app for you and assessed it for its features.
Back in the days
In earlier days of the smartphone, looking back at the first iPhone and Android phones, software was simple. It was clunky yet straightforward, without automation whatsoever. I remember trip-logging from back then. You sit in the car, open the app, enter your start location, enable GPS, and hope that you remembered to stop the tracking at the end of a trip to not kill the battery.
Five minutes later you could actually start to drive, and you needed to keep the phone active the whole time with some apps. Arriving at the destination, you went into the app again to type in an address. Sometimes it simply crashed when saving the logged ride. Worse, when you had many trips or needed to switch phones, the data wasn’t backed up in the cloud—utter frustration, leading back to traditional means of pen and paper tracking. Since then, some ODB dongle app solutions have arrived, but they all require a paid subscription and require you to install hardware in each car you drive.
What MileCatcher does
Okay, coming back from our time travel, we are back in the here and now and want to know more about what MileCatcher can help you with. The MileCatcher app automatically logs your trips and lets you classify them as either business or private.
What I really liked about their app was the fact that they have a great number of functions, which are available to you for free. And since it’s just an app, it allows everybody to just download the free app and have a look and see how the solution would work for them. You can actually “take it for a ride.” without being forced to pay. You can even classify trips from an Apple Watch or via notifications on your phone without actually opening the app.
Why would you track your trips?
Tracking average business mileage per year is critical for financial management whether you’re an independent professional or employed by a company. MileCatcher is compliant with tax regulations of a variety of countries, including Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Scandinavia, and of course, the IRS in the US. So what really happens here is that the app helps you to document business trips to receive expense reimbursement or tax deductions, saving you money. That’s where MileCatcher helps you, and it does that automatically.
Features in a nutshell
Here is a quick summary of some of the key features of MileCatcher. I don’t think that everybody can make use of all the features, but I thought most of them are really handy. What do you think?
- The app detects your drives and logs them automatically (no need to start/stop your activity manually)
- Distances of your routes are calculated accurately and displayed on map for easy recall
- Data is stored in a secure cloud (no loss of data when you upgrade phone)
- You can update your settings to match your needs, e.g., custom purposes to expense per company or project
- You can filter your history in the app or in the web portal whenever you need
Pricing
Before we go into details of the pricing options, I need to reemphasize that the core functions of the MileCatcher app are plainly free for unlimited trips. It’s currently the only automatic mileage app that has no limit to the number of trips logged for free. Reports and export of data are also free, so it’s a good start to try out this mileage app category. If you would like to scale up and auto-classify trips to save time, then consider the use of the premium plan.
It comes in three different options of commitment. If you pay for six months upfront, pricing is $5 per month. Paying for a year in advance costs you $3.99 per month, and for the three-year subscription, it costs only $3.33 per month. If you consider the saving potential on tax deductions, this is a real no-brainer. Let’s be serious here, this is less than your average Starbucks coffee for the monthly fee, and you can save yourself a lot of trouble.
Summary
Checking out the reviews of actual users in the Apple and Google Play app stores, I found them to be mostly matching with my own opinion of MileCatcher. The bottom line for me is that it’s a useful app with very supportive features that you can use or not. It offers a modern interface design and good user experience with the ultimate bonus of automating work for you, giving you reports to get some easy tax deductions. Check it out for free with the buttons below, and make sure to share your opinion in the comment section.
YouTube: MileCatcher Intro
Photo credit: All images shown were provided by MileCatcher.
Editorial notice: This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of MileCatcher. All opinions are 100% mine.
