Oh, Mileage.
There are so many habits I have yet to form as a small biz owner/entreprenuer/solopreneur/freelancer. One of those is tracking my mileage. After last year's 3-hour tour of going through each day of 2014, noting the meetings, looking up the miles in Google Maps then recording them in a Google Doc, I *fully* intended to track my mileage at least each month in 2015.
Yeah. About that.
So I didn't. Here I sit, forcing myself to go somewhere interesting (Napa Palisades downtown), beer, reuben balls (amazing) and every device I own to try to get this done. Then I thought...if I could only export my calendar into an Excel spreadsheet, life would be a little bit easier.
Found it. Thank you, internet geniuses.
GTimeReport accesses your calendar and creates an Excel Spreadsheet in approximately 2.3 seconds. Incredible. I customized my report to only show the meeting info & date, then I just added a column for roundtrip miles. I'll need to clean it up before sending on to my accountant - my calendar gets messy - but all in all, this probably shaved off a few hours of debilitatingly boring work.
Steps:
- Download Excel spreadsheet of your calendar
- Create a column for miles
- Look up each line item in Google Maps (this is the time suck, but better than a paper map, eh?)
- Clean up unnecessary entries or rows
- Send to accountant
- Pass Go
I am so thrilled with this solution but I swear I'll still try to be better about tracking my mileage in 2016. I swear.
