Inspections, home visits, site calls, the drive to the print shop. It’s real money and real tax, and it lives on the back of an envelope until the day somebody asks you to justify it.
GPS tracking is the wrong shape for this work. It drains your battery, it watches you on a Sunday, and what it produces is an estimate with a map attached — which is exactly the thing that doesn’t hold up when questioned.
What holds up is two odometer readings, a vehicle, a route and a date. That is what every reimbursement form and every auditor actually wants, and almost no app records it.
Two odometer readings and a route are a claim. A GPS trace is a guess with a map on it.
And you can overwrite the start — you had personal miles in between, which is the normal case, not an error.
Standard ⟶The meeting had a place, so the route is already filled in and the drive can start a timer with it.
Standard ⟶A .csv with a header row, a total row, and the odometer span on every line — because that’s the column that gets questioned.
Standard ⟶On the 1st, with the file already made and a task on your Today. That is the whole feature.
Standard ⟶An inspector’s project shows work orders, mileage and no rate anywhere. A consultant’s shows clients, hours and a value. Same software, and neither has to look at the other’s screen.
The rate is yours to set — the current federal figure by default.
“My phone already does this automatically.”
It does something automatically. It also records the school run, guesses at the route when signal drops, and needs your location in the background forever — which is a lot of surveillance to accept for a number you still have to correct by hand.
Two taps in a parked car — before you set off and after you stop — gives you a figure nobody will argue with. And if you forget, the report on the 1st finds it anyway.
No background location, ever. The app knows where you drove because you told it, and only about the trips you chose to log.
Start the trip before you pull away and put the phone down. When you’ve arrived, one big target opens it again and you type the closing odometer — two numbers, parked. Nothing in here needs your attention while the car is moving, and you shouldn’t give it any.
Mileage you never submitted becomes a task with the spreadsheet attached. That’s the part that actually gets you paid.
Each trip records which one, and the report can slice by vehicle — which most reimbursement forms require.
It’s one rate you set — the current federal figure by default. Changing it never rewrites a trip you already logged, because each trip keeps the rate it was logged at.
It keeps what you typed and shows a save queue; the timer runs on your phone’s clock, not my server. It goes up when you’re back.
No. There is no manager view and no automatic export. You produce a sheet and you send it — that’s deliberate.
Two taps, parked, engine off. On the first of the month the report will come and find you, whether or not you ever open the desk again.
This is the short version of the site, cut down to what reads well on a small screen. The full thing — every instrument explained, the pricing configurator, the whole story — lives on the desktop site. So does the app: Cloudbase is meant to be worked from a real screen, at a desk, with your hands on it.