Mileage — Employee Guide
For anyone who drives for work. Short version: track each business drive in the Arcvue mobile app, say what it was for, and Arcvue turns your trips into a reimbursement on an expense report — at the right per-mile rate, without you typing a single dollar amount.
Where you track mileage
You track mileage in the Arcvue mobile app, on the Mileage tab. Your phone has the GPS, so that's where a drive gets measured. The web app doesn't track drives — it only ever shows mileage after it has been rolled up onto an expense report (see below).
Two things are true no matter how a trip is captured:
- You never type a dollar figure. Arcvue applies your organization's current per-mile reimbursement rate for you (more on the rate below).
- You only ever see your own trips. Mileage is private to you until it rolls up onto your expense report.
What is on the Mileage tab
Three views sit across the top, and they show your trips three ways:
| View | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Summary | the month's miles and reimbursement totaled by what you charged them to |
| Trips | every trip in the month on its own, newest first |
| Review | every trip Arcvue captured that still needs a charge |
Previous month and Next month step the period, and they move Summary and Trips only. Review is deliberately not tied to a month — an unclassified trip queues until you deal with it, whichever month it happened in. That is the useful half: you cannot hide work from yourself by standing on the wrong month, and a total that looks wrong is usually the month, while an empty Review really does mean nothing is waiting on you.
Swipe works through that queue trip by trip — named for what you do, not for where it goes; its accessible name is the longer Classify one at a time by swiping. Meanwhile Dismiss charge picker backs out of a trip without choosing, leaving it in the queue rather than guessing on your behalf. The queue itself is described under Classify later below.
Two buttons act rather than navigate. Start tracking a trip begins measuring a drive now (see Starting and stopping a trip). Add mileage lines to expense report takes the month's classified business trips and puts them on your expense report — that is the rollup described under How trips become an expense report, and it is the point at which mileage stops being private to you.
Mileage settings holds what Arcvue asks for once rather than per trip.
Correcting a saved trip. Open the trip and edit it. Delete this trip removes it outright — use it for a drive that never happened or was recorded twice, not for a personal drive. A personal drive should be charged Personal, because that keeps your business-vs-personal split honest; deleting it just makes the mileage disappear.
Before the first trip — what Arcvue asks for, and why
The first time you tap Start tracking, Arcvue shows you a disclosure before your phone's own location prompt appears. Read it once; it is short and it is the whole bargain:
- What is collected — your location.
- When — only while a trip is being tracked. The live tracker runs in the foreground: it is not watching you when you are not tracking a trip.
- What for — measuring the distance of the trip, so your mileage can be reimbursed.
- It is never sold and never shared.
Continue is your consent and starts the tracker. Not now declines, and nothing is collected. You can decline and still record trips — you enter the miles yourself instead.
Nobody but you can turn this on. There is no employer switch: neither Arcvue nor your company can activate location tracking on your behalf, and it is not a way of checking your attendance, your hours, or where you were when you worked. It is a convenience for measuring a drive you would otherwise measure yourself, and you remain the one responsible for submitting the correct mileage.
Auto-detect asks for something different, and asks separately
Turning on auto-detect is a second, larger permission: Arcvue has to be able to notice you are driving even when the app is closed or not in use. That is background location, the settings card says so in those words, and it is a separate decision from the one above.
Your phone will ask you to choose the always-on option, and the two platforms call it different things:
| Your phone | The setting to choose |
|---|---|
| Android | Allow all the time |
| iPhone | Always Allow |
If you pick the while-using-the-app option instead, live tracking still works — auto-detect will not.
Starting and stopping a trip
On the Mileage tab you can capture a drive two ways:
- Track it live. Tap Start tracking when you pull out and Stop tracking when you arrive. Arcvue records the drive — the miles and the route — as one trip.
- Let it auto-detect (optional). If you turn on auto-detect, Arcvue notices when you're driving and captures the trip on its own, so you don't have to remember to tap Start. Auto-detect is off until you opt in.
The buttons on the tracker
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Start tracking | Begins the trip. |
| Stop tracking | Ends it and shows you what was measured. |
| Miles driven | The measured distance — and you can change it. If the figure is wrong, type the right one; you are the one responsible for the mileage you claim, and the tracker is a convenience, not an authority. |
| Business purpose | What the drive was for. |
| Save trip | Keeps it. |
| Discard trip | Throws it away. |
| Close mileage tracker | Leaves the screen — and it is deliberately disabled while a trip is running, so you cannot dismiss a drive you are still recording. Stop first. |
If the app closed in the middle of a drive
Phones end apps. If that happens mid-trip, the tracker notices when you come back and offers two choices rather than guessing:
- Resume tracking — carry on with the trip that was interrupted.
- Discard unfinished trip — throw it away and start clean.
Neither happens on its own. An interrupted trip waits for you to say which.
Turning on automatic tracking
Automatic drive tracking is the switch on the settings screen, and turning it on asks for the background permission described above — the prompt's button reads Continue and allow Always location.
Either way, one drive becomes one trip. If the same drive somehow gets captured twice (the app and a background detection both fire, or an offline capture syncs late), Arcvue collapses the duplicate automatically — you won't end up reimbursed twice for the same drive.
Checking the miles before you save
Stopping a tracked drive does not save it straight away. Arcvue shows you what it measured — GPS measured 12.4 mi — adjust if needed — over a figure you can edit, with the reimbursement underneath it.
You can change that number. If the tracker lost signal in a tunnel or a parking garage, or followed a detour that was not part of the trip, type the distance you actually drove. The reimbursement updates as you type, so you can see what the correction is worth before you save it.
Change it because the measurement was wrong, not because a different number would be worth more. This is the figure that lands on an expense report and, if anyone ever asks, on an IRS mileage log. Your route is saved with the trip either way, so the drive you made sits on the record beside the distance you claimed.
Saying what a trip was for — the charge picker
A trip only becomes reimbursable once Arcvue knows what it was for. On the trip, open the charge picker and choose exactly one of:
- a contract — the drive was for a specific job you can bill to a customer;
- a cost pool — an indirect purpose such as G&A, B&P, or BD; or
- Personal — not a business drive.
A business trip needs exactly one charge (a contract or a pool). A Personal trip carries no charge — Arcvue still records the miles so your business-vs-personal split is honest, but personal miles never roll up and never get reimbursed or billed.
Classify later
If a trip was captured by auto-detect, it starts out unclassified — Arcvue measured the drive but doesn't yet know what it was for. Unclassified trips wait in a queue on the Mileage tab; open each one and pick its charge when you have a moment. Nothing about an unclassified trip counts until you classify it, so you can drive now and sort it out at the end of the day (or week).
How trips become an expense report — the monthly rollup
Here's the part that keeps mileage sane: Arcvue does not put every little drive on its own expense line. Instead, for a period it rolls up your trips by charge — one line per bucket. All your G&A drives for the month become a single Mileage — G&A line; all your drives on a given contract become one line for that contract; and so on. Each rolled-up line is described for you automatically (for example, "Mileage — G&A: 12 trip(s), 84.3 mi").
The rollup drops those lines onto your expense report for the period (a draft report, or one you're already building). Running it again later is safe — trips that were already rolled up aren't counted a second time. Before you roll up, you can preview the buckets, the pending reimbursement, and your business-vs-personal mileage split.
A rolled-up line can be taken back while the report is still a draft. The line is the sum of its trips, so it is not edited directly — the report refuses and tells you to remove it instead. Remove the mileage line from the draft and its trips return here, un-rolled, so you can correct a trip and roll them up again. Once the report is submitted, the line stays as filed.
The rate, and why you don't type a dollar amount
Arcvue reimburses mileage at a per-mile rate it looks up by the date of the trip (rates change at year boundaries, and sometimes mid-year). It uses your organization's configured rate, falling back to the standard IRS business rate if you haven't set your own. This is a FAR 31.205-46 reimbursement rate — the amount the company pays you back — and it is deliberately not a contract billing rate. Because Arcvue supplies the rate, you can't accidentally over- or under-state a reimbursement by typing the wrong number: reimbursement is simply your miles × the correct rate.
Certifying and getting reimbursed
Tracking a trip measures it — it is never a certification. The legal attestation happens the same way it does for time: on the expense report, when you submit and certify it. Mileage rides the normal expense-report path — draft → submitted → approved → posted → reimbursed — and, as with every expense, the person who submits a report can't be the one who approves it.
Two conveniences worth knowing:
- No receipt needed. Mileage is substantiated by the trip record itself (the date, the miles, the purpose, the charge), so — unlike a hotel or airfare — a mileage line needs no receipt attached.
- Certification is deliberate, never automatic. Even if you use voice shortcuts elsewhere in Arcvue, nothing certifies mileage by voice. You certify it yourself when you submit the report.
What to do
- Track every business drive — tap Start tracking and Stop tracking, or turn on auto-detect and let it capture drives for you.
- Say what each trip was for — pick the contract, the cost pool, or Personal. Clear your unclassified queue regularly.
- Roll up and submit — let Arcvue fold your trips into your expense report, then submit and certify it like any other expense.
- Leave the math to Arcvue — you never type a per-mile amount; the rate is applied for you by trip date.
That's it. Track, classify, roll up, certify — accurate business mileage, reimbursed at the right rate, with none of the one-line-per-drive clutter.
Related
- Submit the report your mileage lands on → Submitting an Expense
- Record your hours → Timekeeping
- Everything else on the phone → Using the Arcvue Mobile App