Mileage Log for the Self-Employed: App, Spreadsheet or AI-Built Sheet?

Each business trip needs a date, start and destination, purpose and miles driven, written up close to the time, with a running yearly total and, ideally, daily odometer readings. An app wins when you make many short stops a day, a spreadsheet wins on fixed rounds, and an AI-built sheet is simply a spreadsheet set up faster.

The fields come from two tax authorities' own guidance, which I read in October 2026, and rules differ by country and by method. Treat everything here as record-keeping, not tax advice: your accountant decides how each trip is treated, and a good log simply makes that decision possible. The worked month below is an illustration of a busy solo electrician, with made-up trips and an assumed rate.

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What a mileage record has to show

Rules vary by country and change over time, but two authorities' published wording is worth knowing. One publication on travel and car expenses sets out four elements for car use: the mileage of each business use plus total miles for the year, the date, the destination and the business purpose. Its sample daily log has columns for date, destination, purpose, odometer start and stop, and miles for each trip. The other authority says a contemporaneous record of business mileage must be kept to support its flat rate, asks you to record business miles over the year, and limits that rate to journeys made wholly and exclusively for business, so private journeys (the guidance gives travel from home to work as its example) are out. Whether a particular trip of yours is business or private is a question for your accountant. It matters most for the first drive of the day: whether leaving home for a customer's site counts as that example or as business travel depends on how your work is set up, so log the trip and ask rather than leaving it out or assuming either way.

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Both lean on timing. The first publication says a record made at or near the time has more value than a later statement and treats a log kept weekly as timely. The second uses the word contemporaneous. So guesses written up in January are the weak spot, whichever tool you pick.

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App, plain sheet or AI-built sheet side by side

An AI-built sheet is not a different kind of record. It is a Google Sheet that an assistant has laid out for you, with the dropdowns and formulas already in, so it differs from a plain sheet mainly in how long the set-up takes. The real contest is automatic capture against manual entry.

One electrician's month: 98 trips and 1,123 miles

Here is the illustration. A self-employed electrician works alone from one van over 21 working days. Typical days are a job visit, a supplier run, then a second job and home, which makes about 4.7 trips a day. The first days of the log look like this:

Over the month the log totals up like this:

To see what is at stake, price the month at an assumed 50 cents a mile. That is a round number for the sum, not anyone's official rate; use whatever your own rules and adviser give you. It makes 1,123.2 miles worth $561.60. Missing one working week, 5 of the 21 days, removes roughly 267 miles, which is about $134 at the same 50 cents. That is the price of a blank week.

Now the cost of getting the trips into the log. These are my planning allowances, not measured data, and they value your time at an illustrative $40 an hour:

• Plain sheet, typed by hand: 60 to 90 minutes a month for 98 trips at roughly 40 seconds each, which is $40 to $60 of your time and $0 in fees.
• Paid app: 10 to 20 minutes classifying drives and fixing the odd one, plus $11 for a Driversnote Pro month, so about $18 to $24 all in.
• AI-built, form-fed sheet: about 45 minutes, since 98 trips at about 20 seconds each on a phone form come to roughly 33 minutes and a month-end reconciliation on the Odometer tab takes ten more, so about $29.

The free sheet is only cheapest if your time is free. For a month of 98 trips, the paid app and the assisted sheet both beat typing every trip by hand. Run your own month through the same sums: at 30 trips a month a free app tier may cover you, and the answer changes completely.

Where the free app plans run out

The free tiers matter because they decide when the paid fee starts. At 4.7 trips a working day, the electrician hits Driversnote's free limit of 15 trips a month on day 4. Everlance's free Basic plan detects 30 trips automatically each month (manual entries stay unlimited), and that runs out on day 7. MileIQ's free plan covers 40 drives and runs out on day 9. After that the choice is a paid plan or typing.

The paid prices, from each vendor's own page: Driversnote Pro is $11 a month on its dollar-priced page, with no yearly price shown, so $132 for a year of monthly billing. MileIQ Unlimited is $13.99 monthly or $11.66 a month billed annually, which is $167.88 or $139.92 a year. Everlance's page showed two different price lists, putting its Starter tier between $69.99 and $89.99 a year, so check which applies on the day. A tradesperson with a handful of long trips a day may never leave a free tier. This one runs out of every free tier within the first two weeks.

Building the sheet with an assistant

A chat assistant is good at laying out a sheet and weak at knowing your rules, so give it the layout and forbid it from inventing anything. The brief below produces four tabs: Trips, Odometer, Month and Rates.

Build me a mileage log for Google Sheets for a self-employed electrician
with one van. Tabs:
1. Trips: Date, Vehicle, From, To, Purpose (dropdown: Job visit, Supplier
   run, Quote visit, Admin), Job reference, Miles, Business? (Yes/No
   dropdown), Logged on, Notes, Value.
2. Odometer: Date, Vehicle, Start reading, End reading, Day miles, Logged
   business miles, Difference.
3. Month: one row per month with trip count, business miles and
   year-to-date business miles.
4. Rates: Effective from, Rate per mile. Leave it blank; I will fill it in.
Give every formula with the exact cell it goes in, using SUMIFS and
COUNTIFS, no scripts. Formula cells must stay blank when inputs are blank.
List the data-validation rules separately. Do not invent rates, dates or
trips.

A sound answer contains formulas like these (Trips has Date in column A, Vehicle in B, Miles in G and Business? in H; row 2 is the first row of data):

Odometer!E2  =IF(AND(ISNUMBER(C2),ISNUMBER(D2)),D2-C2,"")
Odometer!F2  =IF(E2="","",SUMIFS(Trips!$G:$G,Trips!$A:$A,A2,Trips!$B:$B,B2,Trips!$H:$H,"Yes"))
Odometer!G2  =IF(E2="","",E2-F2)
Month!B2     =COUNTIFS(Trips!$H:$H,"Yes",Trips!$A:$A,">="&A2,Trips!$A:$A,"<"&EDATE(A2,1))
Month!C2     =SUMIFS(Trips!$G:$G,Trips!$H:$H,"Yes",Trips!$A:$A,">="&A2,Trips!$A:$A,"<"&EDATE(A2,1))
Month!D2     =SUMIFS(Trips!$G:$G,Trips!$H:$H,"Yes",Trips!$A:$A,">="&DATE(2026,1,1),Trips!$A:$A,"<"&EDATE(A2,1))
Trips!K2     =IF(AND(H2="Yes",ISNUMBER(G2)),IFERROR(G2*LOOKUP(A2,Rates!$A$2:$A$20,Rates!$B$2:$B$20),"no rate for date"),"")

The Odometer tab is the quiet hero. Its last column shows the miles you drove that day that did not appear in the trip list, so a day with a 60-mile difference is a day with missing trips or private driving. The Value column prices each trip at the rate in force on its date, so a change in rates needs one new row on the Rates tab rather than a rebuilt sheet. That is not hypothetical: both authorities changed a rate during 2026, one in the middle of the year and one at the start of its tax year. Keep the Rates rows in date order, oldest first, because LOOKUP relies on it. If your rules step the rate down after a mileage threshold, the Value column will overstate the miles beyond it; watch the year-to-date column and ask your accountant how to value the rest. Month!D2 starts counting on 1 January; change that date to the first day of your own tax year.

Feeding the Trips tab from a phone form

The 20-second entry in the time sums comes from a form, not from typing into a spreadsheet on a phone. In Google Sheets, Tools then Create a new form makes a form linked to the file, and its answers land on a new responses tab. Give it one question per Trips column in the same order: Date, Vehicle (dropdown), From, To, Purpose (the same four dropdown choices), Job reference, Miles (with a number-only rule) and Business? (Yes or No). Save the form's link to your phone's home screen so it is one tap away when you get back in the van.

Two details make it work. The responses tab adds a Timestamp column in front of your questions, which shifts every column one place to the right, so either ask the assistant to rewrite the formulas for that layout or keep a Trips tab that copies the responses across. And that timestamp is worth having: an entry stamped 17:42 on the day of the trip shows when you logged it, which is the timeliness point both authorities make, recorded without any extra effort. A trip entered three weeks late carries a timestamp that says so too, which is one more reason to log on the day.

How to check the sheet before you trust it

1. Enter five test trips with miles you know, and confirm the month total matches your own addition.
2. Add a day with an odometer reading but no trips, and confirm the Difference column shows the full day's miles.
3. Leave a row half empty and confirm the formulas stay blank instead of showing zero or an error.
4. Protect the formula columns so a stray keystroke cannot overwrite them, and download a copy at each month end.

Three things a first draft usually gets wrong

Illustrative, but typical of what a first answer contains when you do not forbid it:

• The month total ignores the Business? column. Saturday's private trip to a garden centre then counts as business miles. Fix it by adding the "Yes" criterion to every SUMIFS and COUNTIFS, as in the formulas above.
• It fills the Rates tab "so you can see it working". Those figures are invented. Delete them and enter only what your own rules give you.
• It hard-codes 1 January as the start of the year. If your tax year starts elsewhere, the year-to-date column is wrong from the first day.

Gemini's =AI() function exists in Sheets on eligible plans, but for a log I would use plain formulas for every check and keep AI for building and reviewing the sheet. A function whose answers can change between runs belongs nowhere near a record you may have to defend.

Rough notes into log rows without inventing anything

The second useful job is turning notes into rows. Imagine you dictated this at the end of two days:

Monday. Yard to Job A about six miles. Wholesaler for cable, three miles
each way roughly. Back to the yard 6.4 from Job A. Tuesday quote at Job B,
11.8 there, then Job C 5.5 and home 9.7.

The instruction that matters: "Make rows with Date, From, To, Purpose, Miles and Flag. Copy every number exactly as written. Put 'estimate' in Flag wherever I said about or roughly. Do not add trips, round anything or fill a blank." A good result (illustrative) has seven rows: Yard to Job A, 6, flagged estimate; Job A to Wholesaler, 3, flagged; Wholesaler to Job A, 3, flagged; Job A to Yard, 6.4; Yard to Job B, 11.8; Job B to Job C, 5.5; Job C to Yard, 9.7. The row to look at is Wholesaler to Job A: you said "three miles each way", so the assistant created the return leg itself. Confirm that the van really went back to Job A before that row stays.

Two more fixes before the rows count. The assistant writes "Monday" because that is what you said, so replace it with the real date. And the flags show exactly which miles to swap for odometer or map readings. A row flagged as an estimate is a placeholder, not a record.

Rebuilding a log after a missed fortnight

It happens: two weeks, no entries. The rebuild is worth doing, but only from evidence. Use the calendar, the invoice list (job addresses and dates), supplier receipts with times, fuel receipts and phone photos, which carry the date and time they were taken. Then:

1. Write each rebuilt trip into the log with a note such as "Reconstructed on 18 October from calendar and invoice J-1041", and keep the sources in a folder.
2. Take odometer readings at both ends of the gap if you have them. The van read 41,230 miles at the start and 41,812 at the end, so it covered 582 miles. Your rebuilt business trips come to 498, which leaves 84 miles of private or unlogged driving, a plausible figure.
3. If the rebuilt trips had come to 640, you would know 58 miles of that were wrong, because the van cannot do more business miles than it did in total. Go back to the sources until the sums fit.
4. Ask your accountant how rebuilt entries will be treated. Records made at the time carry more weight than reconstructions, which is the reason to fix the habit rather than the paperwork.

An assistant can help here with one job only: comparing your rebuilt rows against an export of your calendar and flagging days with no trip, or two jobs far apart on the same afternoon. It must not fill the gaps itself. The tutorial on organising records for your accountant has prompts for the tidy-up that comes after.

Questions to ask any mileage app before you pay

• What happens at the cap? Free plans limit trips or drives (15, 30 or 40 a month on the three pages above). Find out whether tracking stops or merely goes manual.
• Can I edit, and is the edit recorded? Driversnote's Pro plan lists an edit log. A log that can be changed silently is weaker than one that shows what changed.
• Can I export everything, and does it survive cancelling? Ask for the file formats in writing. Test the export in month one, not at the end of the year.
• What is the default for a new drive? If an unclassified drive counts as personal, you lose business miles you forgot to swipe. If it counts as business, you may overclaim.
• Can I add trips by hand? Everlance says manual trips are unlimited on every plan, which covers a phone that died mid-day.
• Does it handle two vehicles or a second driver? Driversnote has a Teams plan at $11 a licence for two to ten users, if a partner drives the other van.

If the app side of the comparison interests you, the receipt-scanning tutorial for tradespeople covers the matching problem for receipts, and the tutorial on AI expense management shows where mileage sits in a wider workflow.

Which one to choose, by how you work

If you cannot decide, run both for one month. Keep the app on the phone and the sheet beside it, then compare totals. If they differ by more than about 5%, find out why before trusting either; the gap is usually a day the phone was off or a trip you forgot to type. After one month you will know which tool you actually keep up, and that is the better test than any comparison table. For a sheet that turns logged costs into a monthly set-aside figure, the set-aside sheet tutorial picks up where this log stops, and the Google Sheets AI prompts tutorial has more prompts for building sheets with an assistant.

Mileage log questions tradespeople ask

How soon after a trip should I write it down?

As soon as you can, ideally the same day. One authority's publication treats a log kept weekly as timely, and the other asks for a contemporaneous record. A weekly slot is the longest gap I would allow, because the detail fades faster than people expect, and a Friday catch-up is easier than a January one.

Do I need odometer readings for every trip?

Not necessarily. The sample log in one publication shows odometer start and stop columns, and total miles for the year is a listed element. A start and end reading each working day, with trip lines that add up to it, is a sensible compromise. Ask your accountant what your own method requires.

Can I use a Google Sheet instead of a paid app?

Yes, provided the record shows the date, destination, purpose and miles for every trip and is kept up to date. One publication says a record prepared on a computer is adequate, and the other pages I read do not prescribe an app. Apps earn their fee by capturing trips automatically, not by being more acceptable.

What if I forgot to log for a few weeks?

Rebuild it from calendar entries, invoices and supplier receipts, mark each row as reconstructed with the date you did it, and keep the sources. Records made at the time carry more weight than rebuilt ones, so ask your accountant how reconstructed trips will be treated before you rely on them.

Further reads

• Mobile Mechanic Software for One Van: Jobber vs ServiceM8 With AI — Job software for a one-van business, which already holds your job addresses.
• Best AI for Tradesmen: Seven Phone Apps for Quotes, Notes and Receipts — Seven phone apps for quotes, notes and receipts.
• AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.

Sources: two tax authorities' published guidance on vehicle and mileage records (a publication on travel and car expenses, a standard mileage rates page, and pages on simplified expenses and flat-rate mileage), and the pricing pages of Driversnote, MileIQ and Everlance, all read in October 2026.