For Business & Personal: Allow users to set their own mileage rates for tracking travel

jacobs

In the relatively new Business & Personal section of Quicken Mac, one of the new features is being able to track mileage for tax deduction purposes. It automatically applies the correct IRS rate for business and for personal (medical, charity) trips. However, users cannot enter their own mileage rate when it would be useful. For example: a business owner may charge a client/customer an agreed upon rate for mileage which is not the IRS rate. Quicken should allow rate override/manual rate entry so users could enter these trips and export* or print* them to bill the client for the travel services rendered.

(*Export and print of mileage is not yet available, but the developers have previously stated one or both of those options will be coming in the near future.)

If you would find it useful to be able to enter your own mileage rate rather than just the IRS rates, please add your vote for this Idea, and enter a comment below about why such a feature would be useful for you.

NotACPA

@jacobs Would you expect this "rate override" to be at the transaction level … or global (which I'd have a problem with).

jacobs

Would you expect this "rate override" to be at the transaction level … or global (which I'd have a problem with).

Oh, definitely at the transaction level. This would be just to give users the option to record some trips at a rate other than the three IRA default rates for business travel, personal medical, and personal charity, if/when appropriate for their tracking needs.

UKR

Vehicle Mileage in Quicken for Windows has a setting for Trip Type: Other where you can set your own rate.
However, there's only one setting available.

What if you need one setting for Customer A, another for Customer B, and so on?

For Q Mac, if and when Customer Invoices become available and in Q Windows, I'd rather define and use an Invoice Line Item for x Travel Miles at $y.yy rate per mile. One can have as many line items as needed, each with their own predefined rate, e.g., TM10 for $10/mi, TM15 for $15/mi, etc.

IMHO, adding customer-specific travel miles to the Mileage Tracker exceeds the design limitations of the program. It's primarily meant for IRS - deductible mileage tracking and has the proper interfaces to tax reporting and export to tax software.

Lastly, there's nothing available yet which makes it possible to enter customer mileage records in Mileage Tracker and have them intelligently appear in a Customer Invoice, similar to other charges marked "E"(expensable) in Q Windows.

jacobs

Vehicle Mileage in Quicken for Windows has a setting for Trip Type: Other where you can set your own rate.

Quicken Mac has "Type" for selecting business or personal, and "Purpose" for selecting from Client Meeting, Medical, Pickup/Deliver, Rideshare or Other for Type-Business or Charity, Medical or Other for Type=Personal. For Type=Business, no matter what Purpose you chose, it sets the rate to 67¢ a mile; for Type=Personal, it sets the rate to 14¢/mile for Purpose=Medical and 14¢/mile for Purpose=Charity and 21¢/mile for Purpose=Medical. Unfortunately for a Personal trip, if you select Other, there's nowhere to set a rate and it just sets it to zero! For a Business trip, selecting Other doesn't offer any opportunity to change the default rate of 67¢/mile.

I was not suggesting something as complicated as customer-specific rates for mileage. At least not now — especially since "customers" don't even exist in Quicken Mac yet! 😂 I am only suggesting that there be an option to select "Other" and enter a per mile rate. I would design it so that a new entry would default to the last-entered trip Type, Purpose and Rate. So if I were entering several trips for a customer, I wouldn't need to enter the rate for each entry. If I had different rates for different customers, then I'd have to enter the correct rate.

I also wasn't suggesting integrating mileage tracking with invoices (which are still forthcoming for Quicken Mac). I think that gets too complicated. No one would want a separate invoice line for each trip. I'm only envisioning something that a user could select a date range, sort the screen by Notes (until/unless there is a Customer field added), and generate a simple report one could use to generate an invoice or invoice line item and be able to send to a client if you need to provide data to back up the invoice.

So my thought behind this feature request was only for a simple feature which could be quickly implemented: a field where a user could enter a manual mileage rate if needed.