With all the work involved between leading a professional life and leading a balanced life, how many times have we forgotten seemingly simple things… such as tracking our business mileage? With everything that goes on in life, it’s easy to brush off logging your mileage – after all, you’re just trying to get from point A to point B without spilling your morning cup of coffee! But when you forget to track your business mileage, it can really put a huge drain your wallet.

Perhaps you do track your business miles, but aren’t aware of certain places that you could be counting towards your expenses. Or maybe you almost always track your mileage, except when you forget to make a note of your trip in your log. Or worse yet, you might not be logging any of your business miles at all!

According to statistics posted on epa.gov, the average mileage per year for normal passenger cars is 12,000 miles. The mileage for people who use their cars for business can be considered higher than that, perhaps closer to

After much research (and many cups of coffee), we’ve crunched the numbers to show you how much money you could be losing if you’re not keeping track of your business mileage. Here are three different scenarios that describe most business people and their mileage tracking habits. What category fits you? How much money could you be saving?

A) You Generally Track Your Business Mileage, you just might not know all the places you can track mileage

People who do this get the “Good Effort” award. Why only “Good Effort?” Even people who are fairly religious about tracking their business mileage often overlook trips that they could count as business mileage. It might be something as simple as not counting your daily 2 mile drive to get your mail (which also has business mail in it) or your drive to the bank (where you deposit a check from your client). If you’re not counting these extra miles you drive every business day, it really adds up. So that you can prevent this from happening, you might want to take a peek at Business Mileage that you didn’t know counted.

The Math: 2 Miles a day x 253 possible Work days

Total Time Not Tracked: 506 Miles

Total Money Lost By Not Tracking: $250+

B) You track business mileage, except when you forget your logs.

Good Job! Almost… Okay, everyone forgets things once in a while. But before you brush aside the lapse of mileage memory, look at how much money you might be missing when you forget your logs! Let’s say you forget to log one day of travel out of each week. If you’re not traveling too often, that’s 300 miles a week, roughly 70 miles a day. And let’s say you forget to record one day out of each work week because you forgot. That’s 3600 miles not recorded in a year. Take a look at how much that little memory leak is costing you.

The Math: 70 miles (one day) not tracked x 52 (once a week)

Total Miles Not Tracked: 3600

Total Money Wasted By Forgetting To Log Miles: $1800+

C) You never track your business mileage.

People in this category get the red alert. First off, why aren’t you tracking your business mileage? Business mileage is perhaps one of the biggest ways to get a tax break from the IRS. Maybe you have a desire to throw out massive amounts of money, or perhaps the IRS is too intimidating. Either way, people in this category might as well have holes in their pockets due to the amount of money they’re losing!

The Math: 22,000 Miles Driven Purely for Business

Total Miles Not Tracked: 22,000

Total Amount of Money Lost By Not Tracking: $11,000 +

With figures like that, it’s easy to see why it’s important to keep track of your business mileage. So, how much money are you loosing each tax year by not logging all your miles?

How Calculations were made:

Estimates based on average business mileage times the 2010 business mileage rate of 0.50 with the average business distance driven of 20,000 miles per year.

Sources

EPA.gov

IRS.gov