Test Run: Mining Your Calendar to Cut Taxes

If you’re like me, you’ll wait until a few days before taxes are due in April before filling out your returns. I can get away with procrastinating, in part, because I don’t have to worry about some of the more tedious tax chores, like figuring out how many miles I drove last year in my personal vehicle for work purposes. That’s because my employer reimburses me for those expenses.

But a lot of people have to take the deduction for car mileage themselves because their employers do not provide reimbursement. And they may be interested in a new Web service, MileLogr, which is designed to make logging of business trips in personal vehicles more  automated and easier.

The service, which was introduced on Monday, is still a little rough around the edges, but it showed promise at being able to reduce the manual logging that goes into figuring out tax deductions for business use of a car.

If you’re not using an online calendar service from compnies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Apple to keep records of all your business appointments, then MileLogr won’t be of much use to you. It can also work with Exchange, the Microsoft e-mail system for businesses, but a lot of those people probably get reimbursed through their employers for miles driven.

Once you give MileLogr permission to access your Web-based calendar, it scours all of your appointments for the last year and generates a list of all events ordered by month, with little buttons next to them that let you say whether they were deductible or not.

In my test, which I conducted with a Google Calendar filled with made-up appointments, the service didn’t seem to discriminate between driving trips and events that had nothing to do with a car â€" like “phone call with mom.” As a result, you may end up with a lot of irrelevant appointments that you need to classify as nondeductible on MileLogr.

For driving trips, MileLogr performed better the more precise the data I! had entered into my calendar. For example, if I put a specific address in the location field for an appointment, it automatically calculated the miles traveled round trip to the address from my office. You can use any address as your starting point.

In some cases, it had the smarts to calculate the length of a trip even if I didn’t give it an address. For example, I set up a recurring weekly meeting at Microsoft, without supplying the company’s location in Redmond, Wash., about 20 miles from where I live in Seattle. It figured out on its own where Microsoft was located by doing a search of online mapping services. (The chief executive of BizLogr, the company behind MileLogr, is Charlie Kindel, a former longer time Microsoft manager and a respected blogger on technology.)

When I created an appointment that simply said “Starbucks” in the location field, it didn’t even try to list the endless Starbucks retail locations in my area. It still couldnâ€t calculate the length of my trip even after I said “Starbucks 1st Ave South,” which happens to be the location of the coffee giant’s corporate headquarters, along with at least one Starbucks retail store.

Once you’ve specified which appointments are deductible and made sure MileLogr has successfully figured out where your destination was, the service generates a report that you can then download for your records for a fee. MileLogr charges $4.99 for a report that covers 250 or fewer miles traveled, $19.99 for 251 to 2,500 miles, and 1 cent a mile for reports that cover more than 2,500 miles.

MileLogr justifies those prices based on the potential tax savings you can get out of its service. If you traveled 15,000 miles for work in a personal vehicle, for example, you would be eligible for a deduction of $8,325 at the Internal Revenue Service’s standard rate of 55.5 cents a mile. MileLogr says t! hat could! result in a tax savings of $2,747.25, assuming a 33 percent tax bracket.

The $150 you would pay for a MileLogr report for that amount of traveling could well be worth it, but only if the service works with a minimum of manual fussing. Mr. Kindel said the service would get better at automatically figuring out the addresses of your appointments. If you’re sloppy about your scheduling, you might be better off keeping track of your car mileage another way.

If you’re meticulous about the hygiene of your calendar â€" for example, by regularly entering addresses for the locations of your business appointments â€" MileLogr could be very useful. Your mileage with the service will vary.

Test Run: Mining Your Calendar to Cut Taxes

If you’re like me, you’ll wait until a few days before taxes are due in April before filling out your returns. I can get away with procrastinating, in part, because I don’t have to worry about some of the more tedious tax chores, like figuring out how many miles I drove last year in my personal vehicle for work purposes. That’s because my employer reimburses me for those expenses.

But a lot of people have to take the deduction for car mileage themselves because their employers do not provide reimbursement. And they may be interested in a new Web service, MileLogr, which is designed to make logging of business trips in personal vehicles more  automated and easier.

The service, which was introduced on Monday, is still a little rough around the edges, but it showed promise at being able to reduce the manual logging that goes into figuring out tax deductions for business use of a car.

If you’re not using an online calendar service from compnies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Apple to keep records of all your business appointments, then MileLogr won’t be of much use to you. It can also work with Exchange, the Microsoft e-mail system for businesses, but a lot of those people probably get reimbursed through their employers for miles driven.

Once you give MileLogr permission to access your Web-based calendar, it scours all of your appointments for the last year and generates a list of all events ordered by month, with little buttons next to them that let you say whether they were deductible or not.

In my test, which I conducted with a Google Calendar filled with made-up appointments, the service didn’t seem to discriminate between driving trips and events that had nothing to do with a car â€" like “phone call with mom.” As a result, you may end up with a lot of irrelevant appointments that you need to classify as nondeductible on MileLogr.

For driving trips, MileLogr performed better the more precise the data I! had entered into my calendar. For example, if I put a specific address in the location field for an appointment, it automatically calculated the miles traveled round trip to the address from my office. You can use any address as your starting point.

In some cases, it had the smarts to calculate the length of a trip even if I didn’t give it an address. For example, I set up a recurring weekly meeting at Microsoft, without supplying the company’s location in Redmond, Wash., about 20 miles from where I live in Seattle. It figured out on its own where Microsoft was located by doing a search of online mapping services. (The chief executive of BizLogr, the company behind MileLogr, is Charlie Kindel, a former longer time Microsoft manager and a respected blogger on technology.)

When I created an appointment that simply said “Starbucks” in the location field, it didn’t even try to list the endless Starbucks retail locations in my area. It still couldnâ€t calculate the length of my trip even after I said “Starbucks 1st Ave South,” which happens to be the location of the coffee giant’s corporate headquarters, along with at least one Starbucks retail store.

Once you’ve specified which appointments are deductible and made sure MileLogr has successfully figured out where your destination was, the service generates a report that you can then download for your records for a fee. MileLogr charges $4.99 for a report that covers 250 or fewer miles traveled, $19.99 for 251 to 2,500 miles, and 1 cent a mile for reports that cover more than 2,500 miles.

MileLogr justifies those prices based on the potential tax savings you can get out of its service. If you traveled 15,000 miles for work in a personal vehicle, for example, you would be eligible for a deduction of $8,325 at the Internal Revenue Service’s standard rate of 55.5 cents a mile. MileLogr says t! hat could! result in a tax savings of $2,747.25, assuming a 33 percent tax bracket.

The $150 you would pay for a MileLogr report for that amount of traveling could well be worth it, but only if the service works with a minimum of manual fussing. Mr. Kindel said the service would get better at automatically figuring out the addresses of your appointments. If you’re sloppy about your scheduling, you might be better off keeping track of your car mileage another way.

If you’re meticulous about the hygiene of your calendar â€" for example, by regularly entering addresses for the locations of your business appointments â€" MileLogr could be very useful. Your mileage with the service will vary.

Tech Predictions for 2013: It\'s All About Mobile

If there is one theme that will be the topic of digital business this year, it is mobile.

ComScore, which tracks Web and mobile usage, published a report about what happened in 2012, and what to expect in 2013.

It shows that the effects of a movement toward mobile are everywhere, from shopping to media to search. According to the report, “2013 could spell a very rocky economic transition,” and businesses will have to scramble to stay ahead of consumers’ changing behavior.

Here are a few interesting tidbits from the 48-page report.

The mobile transition is happening astonishingly quickly. Last year, smartphone penetration crossed 50 percent for the first time, led by Android phones. People spend 63 percent of their time online on desktop computers and 37 percent on mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, according to comScore.

Jut as they compete on computers, Facebook and Google are dominant and at each other’s throats on phones.

Google’s map app for the iPhone, which had been the most used mobile app, lost its No. 1 spot to Facebook after Apple kicked Google’s maps off the iPhone in October. Now, Facebook reaches 76 percent of the smartphone market and accounts for 23 percent of total time spent using apps each month. The next five most used apps are Google’s, which account for 10 percent of time on apps.

As mobile continues to take share from desktop, some industries have been particularly affected, and they are seeing significant declines in desktop use of their products as a result. They are newspapers, search engines, maps, weather, comparison shopping, directories and instant messenger services.

The most visited Web sites are not so surprising: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon. Facebook continues to take up most of our time online.

But there were a few surprises from young! er, smaller Web companies. Tumblr was No. 8 on the list of sites, ordered by time spent on them. And several Web sites were breakout hits last year, as measured by growth and visitor numbers: Spotify (music), Dropbox (online storage), Etsy (shopping), BuzzFeed (news), JustFab (shopping), SoundCloud (music) and BusinessInsider (news).

Search, one of the biggest and most reliable Web industries, is at a crossroads, comScore said. Even though the search market continues to be extraordinarily profitable, there is a desire for it to evolve and offer new services to users.

Here is some evidence: Searches on traditional search engines, dominated by Google, declined 3 percent last year, and the number of searches per searcher declined 7 percent. Yet searches on specialty sites, known as vertical search engines, like Amazon.com or Whitepages.com, climbed 8 percent.

Social search, based on what users’ friends like, has put Facebook and Google on a “collision course,” comScore said, particularl in searches for local businesses like restaurants.

In social networking, the visual Web, as comScore calls it, has transformed the landscape. Pinterest, Tumblr and Instagram, all of which emphasize images, each gained more than 10 million visitors last year.

Last year was also pivotal for online video, comScore said, as viewers increasingly seek the ability to watch video when and where they want. Watching TV shows online helped last year break viewing records, especially during the Olympics.

In the United States, 75 million people a day watch online video and stream 40 billion videos a month, and viewing is driven by YouTube.

There has also been a turning point for video ads. They cost more than typical ads, and have always lagged behind viewership. But in 2012, 23 percent of videos were accompanied by an ad, up from 14 percent the year before. More TV ad dollars are coming to online video, comScore concluded.

Though e-commerce spending grew 13 percent last year, it wa! s a disap! pointing holiday season online, largely because of economic pressures. Purchasing on mobile phones is beginning to make a dent in e-commerce, comScore said, with mobile shopping accounting for 11 percent of e-commerce in the fourth quarter of 2012, up from 3 percent in the period two years earlier.