 QuickBooks Online 2023, mileage tracking for taxes overview. Get ready to earn the skills needed to boost your bank books on up with QuickBooks Online 2023. Support Accounting Instruction by clicking the link below giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website broken out by category further broken out by course. Each course then organized in a logical reasonable fashion making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page. We also include added resources such as Excel practice problems, PDF files and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable. So once again, click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it. Here we are in our QuickBooks Online test company file using the accountant view as opposed to the business view you can toggle between the two views by going to the cog up top and switching the view down below. We're going to duplicate some tabs to put our major financial statement reports in that being the balance sheet and income statement which we will do basically every time right click on the tab up top to duplicate it right clicking on the duplicated tab to duplicate it as the one to the right is thinking I'm going to tab to the middle and go to the reports on the left hand side open up one of the big favorite financials that being the balance sheet which should be in the favorites it's everybody's favorite report so it'll be in the favorites it should be if it's not put it there then we're going to go to the tab to the right and we're going to go down to the reports on the left hand side and this time the P in the L otherwise known as the profit and loss or income statement I'm going to close the hamburger up top will change the range then I'm going to go from 010123 to 123123 run it tapping to the left scrolling up closing the hamburger changing the range to the same range 010123 to 123123 and let's run that as well and then I'm going to tab to the left this is the setup process we will generally be going through every time this is the workflow I usually think of when working within QuickBooks Online having my data input here my reports open on the right we now want to think about the auto miles tracking options within QuickBooks Online mainly geared to help you with your tax preparation to be able to take the auto deduction using the standard mileage rate although you can think about other uses for this tool as well you might want to track your personal miles for example for your own budgeting purposes and it can be used for that purpose as well we'll talk about the way auto expenses are typically deducted for say a schedule see business a bit in future presentations so you can see how this system might fit into your overall system to help you with your tax preparation at the end of the year right now let's just take a look at an overview of where it is located so we're on the left hand side we're looking for the mileage this is in the accountant view where you have it located here under mileage note that if you're in the business view it'll be located under apps I'm going to go back up to the dashboard so we can see that and go to the cogs tab and I'm going to switch to the business view and then under the business view it's going to be down here under the apps now that could be a little bit confusing at first because it kind of leads you to think that you have to actually basically connect to the app before you're going to see this mileage item here and that's not the case in other words you might be thinking well that means that I have to go into this apps area and then search for the QuickBooks Online auto application that's not the case it'll generally be here just with the normal QuickBooks Online I believe the logic of putting it under the apps area is that then you could integrate this with an app on your phone so if you want to integrate it with an app on your phone then you do have to download the app on your phone and that can help automate the tracking of the miles which we'll talk a little bit about in future presentations I'm going to go back to the switching the view to the accountant view let's go back on into the accountant view and then I'm going to go to the mileage on the left hand side so this is what the screen looks like when you just first go into it says track mileage automatically and get 0.655 dollars a mile that's 65 and a half cents a mile and don't forget that hey penny because it adds up when you have a lot of miles in any case where do they come up with that 0.655 in essence they're taking that from the tax code for auto deductions if you're using a mileage method generally geared towards an aimed at sole proprietor types of businesses that report their taxes with the help and use of a schedule C so that's kind of the primary target for this tool we'll talk more about how to deduct automobile expenses for a sole proprietorship in future presentations because I think that'll help us see how we might integrate this system into our bookkeeping system that might help us to make our tax preparation a little bit more easy at the end of the year but you can also use this tool for other purposes as well you might want to track your personal trips so that you can get a better idea of the personal costs and habits and so on on the personal trips and it does that as well so it says here get the free QuickBooks mobile app point your device's camera at the code and a link will pop up so here's where the application comes into play remember this here I didn't I didn't add an application to get to this on in QuickBooks we're just going into QuickBooks in order to see this but if you want to link and integrate this onto the phone then you're going to have to have the app on the phone that will integrate with your QuickBooks and of course the QuickBooks is on the cloud so you can get into QuickBooks either on the phone or on some other device such as a desktop so me I would imagine using this type of system having the integration on the phone and then and then tracking the miles and then on the desktop typically when doing the bookkeeping I would manage the miles and then allocate the trips to either business trips or personal trips so in essence if you have the app on the phone then the phone can kind of automatically track your miles and track where where you are going and then you can either on the phone or in your desktop computer now that it is integrated go into your system here and allocate all of your trips as business or personal now that's pretty neat pretty cool that it can it can do that because then it's going to track all of the places that you've gone and you can basically allocate those out although it's also can be a little bit weird when you're not used to that because it's like it's tracking basically everywhere you go obviously it's you that's tracking it it's not like the government's following you all around but but still it seems a little bit weird at first but it could be a quite useful information both on the personal side and on the business side just for your own you know decision-making purposes and obviously once you have the business information then you can use that to help with your taxes now note that you do not have to have this mobile app turned on in order to use this system you might simply do manual input into your system for those business types of trips that you're going to be doing so that you can track the business trips and you have a log of the business trips that you have done so that you can get to the total miles that you need for the for the calculation of the taxes and you also have some evidence of the trips that you have have taken that at least you've logged them down right so if you want to go into the mobile app then on your phone then i you can use this picture to hopefully that'll pop it up or it's the QuickBooks mobile app here so i'm going to go ahead and skip this and here's the overall mileage page that we have so we've got the mileage up top i'm going to close up the hamburger and then if i hit the drop down here we've got our years that we're tracking the mileage for and then it kind of gives you a summary up top we'll do some data input into it in future presentations but we have the potential deduction for 2023 now where is it coming up with that deduction you would think it's just using the tax code mileage rate so it's taking this mileage rate now the first thing you might be thinking is well how how is that going to affect my financial statements right because when i do my taxes i'm pulling the information in from my financial statements and that's one of the issues we'll try to dive into it a little bit more in future presentations because uh you need to know a little bit about about how the taxes are calculated to better understand that in other words when you have an expense for auto expenses then that might be your actual expenses but instead of using the actual expenses you might use your miles to deduct the expenses now you you're going to deduct most likely the actual expenses when you buy gas and what not for the car so so then there's going to need to be some kind of adjustment that needs to be happening for taxes if we're not taking the actual expenses but rather taking the mileage method so note that this isn't actually posting anything to your financial statements it's just tracking that information so that you can come up with the total mileage now you could come up with a system and we'll talk about how you might integrate that into your quickbook system to kind of think about what the tax deductions would be we'll kind of play around with that but this isn't actually posting anything it'll just give you the the information so then we've got the the total business miles the total miles here the vehicles and then the per mile you're driving towards a sizable amount and then down here we've got unreviewed so once you start adding trips whether that be through your actual mobile app when you're driving around or if if you're just adding manually they they could go into the unreviewed area and you could sort them by vehicle on the drop down and then these are going to be your business trips so this will be the one that are allocated to the business side so in other words once they're here we will allocate them either business or personal and then you can track your business and personal and then here's all of them business and personal and then up top you've got your drop down where we can add a trip we can manage the vehicles we can uh import trips we can download uh trips uh we can manage favorite locations and you've got the man manage mileage rules so the vehicles of course will be the vehicles that that you're driving you can have multiple vehicles here we'll add vehicles later but I've got two vehicles in here we want to set one as the primary typically and then we've got the download trips which will in essence give you a CSV file which usually opens for most people in like an excel file that gives you some of the trip data which can help you to put together your own little report on the total miles if you need if you need that for whatever reason to give to your tax preparer to help them out or in the case of an audit or something like that that give you some of your data and then you've got your favorite locations which is kind of neat because if you're especially if you're doing manual uh well you can use the favorite locations to to to set a standard location right and then and then you can you could possibly set rules to be allocating if it's a business or personal oftentimes is the main thing with the rules which might be more useful if you're integrating that with like the mobile app so that it basically automatically kind of picks up uh if you're going from one place to another that that's going to be a business versus personal so you have a little bit less toggling as that data pulls into here now remember that you could if you're using the mobile app then then theoretically the if you have locations turned on then the thing's going to track all of your miles all right so which is which again it's kind of cool but it makes me kind of feel like like someone's following me all the time but obviously you're following yourself so that's okay so that's not the government that's tracking you everywhere you go but uh but the information as an accountant uh is intriguing because then you can pull in all the information and you've got a nice audit trail of everything of everywhere you know you have gone so that you can and then you can sort that out and and basically think about how much you're spending and how much maybe even how much time you're spending in particular locations which is kind of interesting but then uh it can pull into here and then you've got and then you can allocate whether they're going to be business but if you don't have the mobile app on or if you don't you know turn your location tracking on all the time if you're paranoid and like i'm not turning that location tracking off i turned the phone off completely i'm not doing it then you can add the trips manually up top so we've got the trips here that you can you can add manually so in future presentations we'll start to add a couple trips and we'll talk more about uh what it what it means to be deducting or how you deduct auto expenses for taxes just to get an idea of how you might use this tool