The Platform · № 05
Every trip carries its own provenance — so a year of driving is a record, not a reconstruction.
A mileage log is only worth what it can survive. If every line looks identical, an odometer reading and a rough guess are indistinguishable a year later — and the honest lines get tarred with the same brush as the sloppy ones. So each trip records how its distance was worked out, and the log shows it.
Start and end readings, and the difference between them. The most accurate thing available, and the only one that reflects what the vehicle actually did.
Real driving distance between the stops, from a routing provider. What a car would cover on actual roads.
Somebody typed the number in. Perfectly legitimate, and labelled as such so it's never mistaken for a measurement.
The fallback when routing isn't available: point to point, as the crow flies. Always shorter than the real drive — an honest underestimate, marked so nobody treats it as exact.
A day's driving is a chain of stops. Each leg is its own record, so a five-job day is five real distances rather than one round number.
Trips belong to a vehicle, so a two-vehicle shop keeps two logs without keeping two systems.
Business or personal, and which job it was for — which is the part the deduction actually rests on.
The log leaves as CSV whenever you want it, with the provenance column intact. Your accountant gets the numbers and how each was derived.
Plainly
It does not track your crew's phones around all day. There's no always-on GPS trail and no automatic drive detection. Trips are recorded against the work. If you want a product that follows a technician's location continuously, this isn't it — and we'd argue you should think hard before buying one that is.
Road-accurate routing needs a mapping key. Without one, distances fall back to straight-line — shorter than the real drive, and labelled that way on every affected trip so you can see exactly which ones. We'll wire up a provider during setup if you want the road numbers.
It's a log, not a tax position. It records what was driven and how the distance was established. Whether a given trip is deductible, and at what rate, is between you and your accountant.
Trips can be entered by hand, and they're marked when they are. We won't pretend a typed number is a measured one. That honesty is the point of the whole module.
Mileage is switched on per instance. Plenty of shops don't need it — it's included either way, and leaving it off means your crew never sees the menu entry (how that works).
We'll walk a real day end to end — including a trip that fell back to straight-line, so you can see how the log tells you rather than hiding it.
Email: [email protected] · included at $149/mo
