What is the best way to track mileage as a dog walker or pet sitter?

Looking after customers’ pets is the fun part of our job, but dealing with the paperwork can be a chore.  Dog walking and pet sitting days are filled with furry adventures and tail-wagging joy but there’s one journey that’s often overlooked – the path to tax savings.

Tracking your vehicle mileage is not just a helpful practice; it’s a financial advantage because business miles are tax deductible.  Reporting them to HMRC is easy if you know how many miles you’ve travelled, but that can be the tricky part.  How do you work out how many miles you’ve travelled? 

Some of your customer journeys may also be chargeable back to them, for example if you offer a pet taxi service or need to take one of the fur babies to the vet.  You may charge by the hour, but also add a mileage cost depending on how far away the appointment is.

We’re here to answer all your burning questions and offer some expert tips for maximising the tax benefits of staying well-organised. Buckle up and let’s embark on the road to tax-smart pet sitting!

Manual records

Let’s face it, we were reporting business mileage for decades before mobile phones became popular.  It’s really not difficult to keep a notebook in your car or van and write down the start and end mileage for each business journey.

Alternatively, you could use Google maps at the end of each day to check the distance between each of your business stops and make a note of the miles travelled.

Easy?  Maybe, but also TEDIOUS! Both of these manual methods work fine, as long as you remember to do it – but that’s the problem; human error!  None of us is perfect and forgetting to log a journey means that the tax man is holding on to more of your earnings, and nobody wants that. 

We want you to spend your downtime on something more fun than adding up miles travelled, so here are some alternatives to the humble pen and paper.

Using apps to track mileage

Most (if not all) pet sitters and dog walkers carry a supercomputer around in their pockets all day in the form of a smart phone, so they may as well use them to make their lives easier.

Using a dedicated app can transform the way you monitor your mileage and, in turn, maximise your deductions.

Mile IQ app

MileIQ automatically tracks miles and makes it easy to classify them as business or personal journeys.  You can set your working hours, to make some journeys automatically flagged as business mileage and can even track miles for multiple vehicles.  MileIQ produces tax-compliant reports each month which can be a huge time-saver.

You can get started for free too, with up to 40 journeys included in their Free plan for individuals.  Unlimited journeys cost $5.99/month and pricing plans are available for larger teams if needed, up to a maximum of $10 per user per month.

This is a very popular app for the pet sitters and dog walkers in our community with one of them commenting “MileIQ is a game changer!”.

Visit the MileIQ website for more information about its features and pricing.

DriversNote

Another tracking app is DriversNote which automatically tracks mileage without even needing to open the app. You can review and approve the trips, as well as categorising them as personal or business, adding notes if needed.  Mileage reports are available to be downloaded in PDF and Excel format, can be customised and are fully compliant with HMRC requirements.

They even have a helpful blog post which sets out the current mileage rates which can be claimed for.

The free version is slightly more restrictive than MileIQ as it only lets you report up to 15 tips per month.  For £8/month you can track unlimited trips and also make use of the iBeacon piece of kit which is fitted to a car and keeps a record of all its journeys.

Visit the DriversNote website for the full lowdown on its features and pricing.

TripLog

Our third recommended tracking app is TripLog which also automatically records mileages.  It claims to be the only tracking app to seamlessly integrate with accounting software such as QuickBooks and Sage. 

The TripLog Lite plan is free but only supports manual trip tracking and is limited to 40 trips.  The Premium plan costs $5.99/month (or $59.99/year) and includes unlimited trips as well as web dashcam, bank and credit card integration, expense tracking with OCR (optical character recognition).  There are also Teams and Enterprise plans for bigger businesses.

Visit the TripLog website for more information.

EverLance

Our final recommendation is EverLance, another auto mileage tracker.  Its free plan however only supports manual mileage tracking but does include one-swipe classification, visual route maps and expense tracking.   The $12/month plan records journeys automatically, allows for ‘smart trip’ classifications and for unlimited miles.  It converts miles driven into money for taxes so you know exactly how much it has cost you to drive versus the tax you can claim back.

Visit the EverLance website for more details.

HMRC rates

No matter which app you use it’s vital for pet sitters and dog walkers to know exactly what they can claim for.  If you can prepare as much as possible for your bookkeeper or accountant you will save money as it will speed up their information gathering phase at the end of the financial year.

Here is a link to the HMRC fuel rates and allowances, for both cars and vans.  Here is a guide to all expenses you can claim if you’re  self employed, and details of corporation tax rates and reliefs for limited companies.