Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Quick HOW-TO for MileBug Beginners

Here's a repost of a blog entry from last January that I thought might be helpful again:
---------------------

First understand that the general idea is that you open MileBug right when you get in the car to go somewhere. You add a trip, enter the data including the starting odometer reading. Then you close it up and drive to your destination. When you arrive, open MileBug and it will automatically take you to the incomplete trip where you now simply enter the ending odometer reading and hit Save. Voila! Now it's in your Trip List.

For the simplest case, focus only on the Trips tab. Don't worry about the others right now. On the top right, there's a "+" button. Simply tap that to add a new trip. You'll see a new screen slide on with different fields for information about the new trip you're about to take. Simply tap on each one to either choose or enter the data for that field. For fields like Business, Destination, Vehicle, etc. you'll be adding a new one to the system by tapping "Add Preset" at the top of the screen that appears when you select Business or one of the others. Simply add the new one, and it will now appear in your set of Businesses, Vehicles, etc. that you can choose from for this trip and all future trips.

If you want to customize a few things, you can do this in the Presets tab. There you can choose among different settings, as well add/edit/move/delete your set of Businesses, Vehicles, Expense Categories, etc. Keep in mind that each business has it's own set of Destinations and Purposes.

5 comments:

Steve said...

I just purchased this app for my iPhone 3GS. The first time I tried to use it, it did not work. When I try and enter the Start Mileage it inserts the Odometer reading as the end mileage. The Start Odometer is at 0 and there does not seem to be a way to enter the Start Odometer. The App only lets me enter the End Odometer. How does one enter the Start Odometer?

Anonymous said...

I need to know if it is possible to upload entries saved in the Lite version to the full version -- I have ten entries and all that data, and now that I purchased the full version, I hope to just be able to upload without retyping everything!

Anonymous said...

How do you move data from an old android phone to a new android phone?

Anonymous said...

I use Milebug on iPhone and have a couple of questions. How does the gps tracking work? Can't find any instructions. I assumed you started a trip then enter the start odo and the started gps tracking and it would calculate miles covered. This didn't work. It said I had covered .9 of a mile after 20 miles.

Is it possible to enter and expense outside of a trip?

MileBug Support said...

The GPS tracking in version 2.0 is "as the crow flies". Version 2.1 which came out yesterday, has full path tracking and map display, but only in the full version. The LITE version is still straight line.

Expenses are currently only tracked relative to a trip.