💡 Inspiration
I hate bookkeeping.
But what choice do I have?
Well for years now I have been building tools to help automate painful manual bookkeeping tasks for the self employed, small business owners and employees. I have built a company and been joined by some amazing engineers who share my vision for automated bookkeeping that not only saves time but also maximize tax deductions.
When talking to our users we have found that many of them are either painstakingly manually recording trips or even worse not doing it and missing out on massive tax write-offs! This is why we decided to launch a standalone automated mileage tracking application.
🚗 What it does
Easy Mileage uses your phones built in GPS to record your drives automatically. Trips can then easily be categorized as business or personal. We find the tax deduction rate for business miles in your country and handle generating reports and keeping a log book so you can save big on your taxes and be prepared in case of an audit.
🔨 How we built it
We built the app using react native with firebase as our backend. Revenue Cat of course handles the IAP and subscription management which is linked with our other app that handles Receipt Scanning as its primary function.
💥 Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenges is dealing with complex permissions management, making user our app uses as little battery as possible and the parsing of location data into well formatted trips.
🏆 Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were able to drastically reduce the battery usage from our MVP version of this app. Also we were able to get the entire team to move quickly and launch this new app in just two weeks.
We have already helped started tracking trips and finding deductions for real users.
We also already had our first users start a trial for our premium plan.
🧑🎓 What we learned
Set aggressive goals and launch quickly. It's better to get something out fast and improve it based on user feedback than attempt to guess all the users needs from the start.
🚀 What's next for Easy Mileage
We have a few more features we'd really like to get into our app:
- Automatic review rules: allowing user to set fine grained rules for certain times or certain locations allowing them to automate the review process
- Web support: allowing users to access and edit their mileage log from their desktop
- Launch on iOS: we built the app in react native so we will soon launch an iOS version
- Improve our location names: using Google places API and other data tricks we believe we can add better context and names to trips and locations
- Real time widget: show trip deductions in real time instead of only after the trip completes with a notification widget
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