Open Mileage in the left navigation (or the Mileage tab in the mobile app), then either add a trip by hand with the start and end locations or total miles, or turn on the app's background auto-tracking so it logs every drive using your phone's GPS. Either way, mark each trip Business or Personal, since only business miles count toward a deduction or reimbursement.
1. Open Mileage. On the web, it's in the left navigation under Bookkeeping. On the mobile app, there's a dedicated Mileage tab at the bottom.
2. Entering a trip by hand. Select Add trip, enter the date, the starting and ending locations (or just the total miles if you don't want QuickBooks calculating the distance), and a short note on the business purpose. Pick which vehicle it was if you track more than one.
3. Turning on auto-tracking instead. This only works through the mobile app. In the app's Mileage settings, turn on auto-tracking, and grant it location access when your phone asks. From then on, it logs every drive in the background without you opening the app.
4. Categorize each trip. On the mobile app, swipe right for Business or left for Personal on each logged trip. On the web, you set the same thing from a dropdown when you add or edit a trip. Trips you never categorize don't count toward anything.
5. Set your vehicle and mileage rate. Under Mileage settings, add the vehicle you're driving and confirm the rate QuickBooks is using to calculate the dollar value of your business miles. This is what turns a trip log into an actual deduction or reimbursement number.
6. Pull the mileage report when you need it. Go to Reports, search "Mileage," and run it for the date range you need, tax season or a reimbursement cycle, for example. It totals business miles and their dollar value for you.
Auto-tracking solves the part people actually forget: remembering to hit start and stop. It doesn't solve what happens after a trip lands in the app. Someone still has to open it regularly and swipe every trip into Business or Personal, and a backlog of fifty uncategorized trips at the end of the month is its own small chore.
It also doesn't connect a trip to anything else in your business. If mileage needs to tie back to a specific job, client, or project for billing or job-costing, QuickBooks has no idea which job a given drive was for. That link happens in someone's head, or not at all, unless it's built to happen automatically.
When a technician or driver is dispatched to a job in your field service tool, the matching trip in QuickBooks gets tagged to that same job or customer the moment it logs, instead of someone guessing which drive belonged to which job weeks later.
Business miles logged over a pay period get totaled against your current rate and pushed straight into the next payroll run as a reimbursement line, instead of someone running the mileage report and typing the number into payroll by hand.
Tell us whether it's feeding payroll, a client invoice, or a tax filing, and we'll tell you what can skip the manual handoff.
Tell us where your mileage data needs to end up, payroll, an invoice, a tax return, and we'll tell you if it can get there without someone manually categorizing and re-typing it. Mileage is just one example of the manual handoffs n-frames fixes; if it's something else in your business eating the same kind of time, that counts too.
Let's talk →QuickBooks Online has its own built-in mileage feature, both manual entry on the web and GPS auto-tracking through the mobile app. You don't need a separate mileage app unless you specifically prefer one and want to import its data instead.
This is a different action from tracking your own trips: it's recording the reimbursement payment you owe an employee for miles they drove. Set up a reimbursement expense account if you don't have one, then pay it out through payroll (as a non-taxable reimbursement item) or as a regular expense if it's outside payroll, using the mileage report's total as the amount.
Desktop doesn't have the mobile app's GPS auto-tracking. Go to Company, then Enter Vehicle Mileage, and add each trip manually with the date, odometer readings or total miles, and the purpose. It calculates the deduction using the mileage rate you've set, the same idea as Online, just without automatic logging.