By Shannon Pekary
One of the first applications available for the PalmPilot helped you track your automobile mileage on your PalmPilot. I know, because I wrote it back in 1996. I originally released it as freeware on Scott's Pilot Page (now http://www.pilot.org), one of the very first software archives for the PalmPilot, and it quickly became so popular, that I quit my job and started Hands High Software to further develop it and other solutions for the PalmPilot.
Trip was born out of my frustration with trying to keep track of my mileage in a paper journal that I kept in the glove compartment of my car. I was having the following problems:
- Our family had more than one car, and I occasionally drove either one. Was I really going to get the mileage log out of the other car, or should I use two logs?
- I drove for many reasons. Sometimes I drove for business, and reported the mileage on an expense sheet at work. Sometimes I drove to pick up hardware for a rental house we owned, and reported that driving as an expense of owning rental property on my taxes. Sometimes I drove as part of volunteer work, and I wanted to write that off as a donation. How was I going to keep track of all that?
- I am lazy. There was no way I was going to figure out how many miles I drove for each purpose, reconciling two logs from different cars. I wasn't going to do it, which was going to cost me money.
Trip was designed to make the tracking and categorizing mileage fast enough, and easy enough that I would actually do it.
There are now many other solutions for tracking automobile activity on the PalmPilot, which all offer various enhancements, including tracking your gas, oil and maintenance records. These include VehicleLog from Little Wing Software (see http://www.lwsd.com) and Kar Kare by Lee Golden (see http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/6608/). All of these packages can track your mileage. The key thing to remember is that you need to just do it!
Why you should track mileage
There are actually a whole lot of reasons why you might want to track your mileage using your PalmPilot. The list below hits all the major areas which the IRS will let you claim some kind of deduction:
