Tip For Recording Mileage to Rental

[Steve Scherrer]

I moved out of a condo about four years ago and rented it out.  I've kept good records on expenses, improvements, etc, but the one thing that was always a pain was having some kind of log of when I visited the rental property for any reason.  It wasn't easy for me to calculate the mileage deduction come tax time without an accurate log.

I started using something that makes this much easier and automated.  Using If This Then That (IFTTT), I set up a "recipe" (as it's called) so that every time my phone goes to the address of the rental condo, it automatically records a log entry with the time and date in a spreadsheet stored on Google Drive.  Now when I want to calculate the mileage I drove for the rental, I can look at this spreadsheet.  I'll assume that a visit on a weekday during normal work hours was made from my office, which is only about five miles round-trip from my office.  An entry on the weekend or outside normal work hours will likely be from my primary residence, which is about forty miles round-trip.  This obviously works for a simple scenario like mine, but I have to believe that having an automated log of visits to any address could be helpful.

I'm really just starting to crack the surface with things you can do with IFTTT.  Lots of cool things you can do.