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iPhone Hits the Road
Although gas costs aren’t the price-gouging affair they were last summer, keeping precise track of your mileage always has its advantages. And when it comes to reporting mileage for expense reports or tax deductions, there’s no better way than the Trip Cubby iPhone app.
Trip Cubby is a fully featured, yet cleanly designed, application that allows users to keep track of miles put on their car.
Photo Credit: armintalic
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Ease-of-Use is Key
App Cubby, the maker of Trip Cubby, prides itself on creating intuitive, well-designed applications for personal productivity. They also make an application called Gas Cubby, which keeps track of fuel costs and car maintenance scheduling.
Another product listed on their site is called Health Cubby, which allows users to track and monitor fitness goals and nutritional intake. It’s billed as “social fitness” by allowing friends to motivate one another to achieve health goals.
As you can tell, App Cubby focuses on essential applications that are fast, clever and easy to use. Because, after all, if you can’t pick it up and input new data in under a minute, you probably won’t use it often enough for it to be useful.
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Getting Ready for Uncle Sam
One of the advantages of Trip Cubby, compared with other similar applications, is that it was designed with IRS compliance in mind.
Trip Cubby allows you to easily integrate your record keeping when it comes time to pay the taxman with Excel-compatible reports e-mailed right to you. Notifications also let you know when certain allowable deduction limits have been exceeded.
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Time is of the Essence
Trip Cubby also uses the same intelligent predictive text found in the iPhone’s text messaging program to help users input data quickly.
Features like input shortcuts and filtering options also allow users to stay in control of their mileage data. You can search for that business trip from last year by date, destination or mileage.
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Is It Worth It?
One of the major downsides of this application is its $6.99 price tag. That seems excessively steep for a simple mileage-tracking app, no matter how well designed it is.
But have no fear; Trip Cubby recently released a limited, but completely free Lite trial version. If you’re skeptical about how this app will supplement your expense tracking, download the free version and give it a whirl.
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Try it Out!
I’m always drawn to applications that feature a free Lite version, because it shows the confidence that the developers have in the application. They know their product isn’t just a quick “take the money and run” download gimmick. They believe it will be helpful.
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What Does Everyone Think?
While browsing the reviews for this app, I noticed almost every rating for the latest updated version of Trip Cubby was a four- or five-star review, a very good sign of a solid app.
The few negative reviews I could find all cited the application being prone to crashes when used on the first generation iPod Touch. However, as most of these reviews were from 2008, it's likely that this issue has been fixed in later updates.
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Summary
If you’re looking for an easy way to track mileage for work expenses or tax deductions, look no further because it seems that Trip Cubby stands above the rest.
Application: Trip Cubby
Cost: $6.99
Use: Allows users to keep track of car travel mileage for expense reports and tax deductions.
Download iPhone app via iTunes.
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Read More: cell phones, gadgets
