Mileage — the deduction most officials never claim
The IRS standard mileage rate turns every business mile into a deduction — typically the single largest deduction an official has. Sixty miles round trip at the current rate is about $45 of deduction per game. Over a season that's real money; over a decade it's a truck payment. It only counts if it's logged.
The rules RefTraq encodes
- Distances in My sites are ONE-WAY; mileage log entries are ROUND TRIP. The app converts for you (site says 42.5 → the trip logs 85) and labels both everywhere. Mixing them silently doubles or halves a deduction, so the app never leaves the basis unlabeled.
- Only the driver deducts. Carpooling as a passenger? The trip still logs (it's part of your records), but at $0 deduction — flip the "I drove" switch off. This is the IRS's rule, not ours.
- A double-header is ONE trip. Two games, same venue, same day — you drove there once. The mileage form warns you if the date already has a logged trip so the same drive never counts twice, and your list of drives asks about any two to one place on one day: keep both, or delete the newer one. (Your pay is per game; your miles are per drive.)
- A day at two places (JV at Dillon HS, varsity at Herrmann Field) is usually one trip that takes in both. The morning-after "Log your drive" reminder fills the round trip to the farther one, the same figure as Driving you can record, and the form says "Your games that day were at Dillon HS and Herrmann Field." Opened from a game's page, it keeps that game. A place nobody measured is named and never given miles; type the whole trip if you know it. If that day already has a trip logged, the form names both places and asks you not to count one trip twice.
- The rate is snapshotted per entry, and it is the rate in effect the day you drove. Not the rate for the year — the IRS can change it mid-year, and in 2026 it did: 72.5¢ through June 30, 76¢ from July 1. A February game and an August game in the same season are deducted at different rates, and that is correct. Each trip stores its own rate when you log it, so old entries never silently recompute when a new one arrives.
- A drive saved before its rate was in RefTraq is found, and re-priced only when you say so. The IRS announces a new year's rate in December, and sometimes changes it midyear; a drive logged before RefTraq had that rate keeps the one it was saved with. When the rate arrives, Taxes names those drives ("12 drives from Jul–Aug 2026 were saved at 72.5¢; the IRS rate for those days is 76¢ — $X more in your deduction") with Re-price them (under actual expenses it says your standard-mileage figure instead, because that figure is not your deduction then). Tap it, read what changes, and tap again: each drive gets the IRS rate for its day, and nothing else on it moves. Rides as a passenger are never re-priced (only the driver deducts). Until you do, the export and the tax meeting sheet say the drives are at an old rate, and their figures stay as saved. This is only for the year you are filing and later: a year already filed shows nothing, so a return you have sent in is not reopened.
Going out of route
Your tax miles are the trip itself: from your door to the venue and back, the way RefTraq measures it. When you go out of your way for the job, like picking up a crewmate, a detour or a second stop, add only those miles and say why. On a drive's page, tap + Add extra miles, type the miles and pick a reason; Log a drive has the same box. The miles join the round trip at the rate the drive was saved with, and the reason goes into the drive's notes ("+6 mi out of route: picked up crew"), so the log shows your preparer where the extra came from. A passenger still deducts nothing.
Fixing a drive you saved
Open the drive from Track and tap Edit this drive to fix its date, where it started (From), where it went (To), its business purpose, or who drove. Only what you change is saved; the miles, the notes and the game it was for stay as they are. Moving the date prices the drive at the IRS rate for the new day, and the form says that rate before you save (in 2026, a drive moved from July 1 back to June 30 goes from 76¢ to 72.5¢ a mile). Changing anything else keeps the rate it was saved with. Mark a ride as I rode as a passenger and it stays in the log at $0, since only the driver deducts. On the Mileage log, each drive listed with no destination or purpose opens with these boxes ready. To fix the miles, use + Add extra miles or tell Quick add.
The one rule RefTraq does not apply for you: commuting
Commuting — the drive between your home and your work — is never deductible. RefTraq logs every trip you give it as business travel, because that is what you told it, and it will not second-guess you. But whether a particular drive from your house to a field is business travel or a commute is a real question, and it turns on facts about you, not about the game.
There are two ways a drive from home is business travel rather than a commute:
- You have a qualifying home office. Then your home is where the workday starts, and the drive from your front door to a game is business mileage — every time, near or far. This is the clean answer, and it is why the home office page in this guide argues that the deduction is usually worth less than the drives it unlocks.
- The venue is outside your metropolitan area. Without a home office, a drive to a temporary work location is business travel when that location sits outside the metro area where you live and normally work. Inside it, the IRS view is that you are commuting.
The catch on that second one: the IRS has never put a number on "metropolitan area". For a College Station official, Bryan is plainly inside it and Montgomery is plainly outside it, and there is a band in between where reasonable people disagree.
RefTraq will not decide this. A rule that guessed at your home office, or drew a circle around your town, would be guessing about a deduction that has to survive an audit. What the app does is keep a clean, contemporaneous log of every trip — which is what you need in either case — and put the question in front of you so you raise it with your CPA instead of finding it in a letter.
Standard mileage, or your actual car costs
There are two ways to deduct a car, and you pick one. RefTraq uses the first one unless you tell it you use the second.
Standard mileage is the one above: a flat IRS rate per business mile. The rate already covers fuel, insurance, repairs, tires, oil and depreciation — that is why Gas shows as 0% deductible in RefTraq. Deducting fuel on top of the per-mile rate is claiming it twice, so RefTraq never adds the car's own costs (gas, maintenance, cleaning, vehicle insurance, registration and fees) into your deductions on this method, whatever percentage one was saved with. Taxes and the export list them apart as car costs on record.
Actual expenses means adding up what the car really cost you for the year — fuel, insurance, repairs, registration, depreciation — and deducting the share of it that was business. That share is your business miles divided by your total miles, which means you still have to log every business mile either way.
Parking and tolls are deductible on top of either method.
Which one wins is arithmetic, and it is not always the mileage rate. What makes it more than arithmetic is that the choice can stick:
- The year you first use a car for business is the year that decides. Choose actual expenses that first year and you can never switch that vehicle to standard mileage.
- A leased car is committed for the whole lease.
- Switching from standard mileage to actual expenses later forces straight-line depreciation from then on.
- Every mile claimed at the standard rate quietly reduces what the car is worth on paper, which shows up the day you sell it.
RefTraq shows you both numbers now. Taxes → Which car deduction puts them side by side: the standard figure straight from your log, and the actual figure from your year's running costs and the share of your driving that was business. It will not pick for you. A choice that binds you for the life of a truck is not one an app should make on your behalf, and the bigger number this year is sometimes the wrong answer over five. It also shows you the thing nobody mentions — how much of your vehicle's value on paper this year of standard mileage quietly used up, which is a bill that arrives the day you sell.
The Taxes screen shows both figures too, under "Your car, both ways": your miles at the IRS rate, and the car costs you logged in Track at your business-use share. You can claim only one of them for a car, never both, and the screen says which one your total counts. That actual figure is only what you logged here; the car's full figure also counts bills you did not log and its depreciation. Until you log a car cost (and while you use standard mileage), Taxes starts this as one line, that a car can be deducted two ways and you claim only one; Show both ways opens both figures right there.
What you type there is not kept — except two things, if you ask it to. You can tell RefTraq which method you actually use, and if it is the actual-expense one it also keeps your total miles for the year, because that is what turns your log into a business-use percentage.
Choosing the actual method changes four things. The car's own costs (gas, maintenance, cleaning, vehicle insurance, and registration and fees) stop reading 0% deductible, because the per-mile rate is no longer covering them — new entries in those categories are proposed at your business-use share instead. The Taxes screen and the Schedule C export stop saying standard mileage. Taxes, Track and the mileage log stop calling what your miles come to at the IRS rate a deduction: they say it is not deducted, and that the miles prove your business-use share. And the mileage line of the export goes blank on purpose: under the actual method your miles at the IRS rate are not a deduction, so the Line 9 row for them states the method and your share and has no amount. The car costs you did log are not added into your deductions either: Taxes and the export list them apart, with what they come to at your business-use share, worked out from what you spent. Line 9's amount is parking and tolls only, and says the car is not in it. RefTraq does not put a number on the whole car; that total is yours and your advisor's, from all of the car's bills. Net profit and the self-employment tax are then before your car's actual costs, and say so. Your mileage log still prints, because that is what proves the share.
Changing the method never rewrites anything you already saved. An expense keeps the percentage it was saved with, exactly as a logged trip keeps the IRS rate from the day you drove it. It changes what RefTraq suggests from here, and what the export says.
Until you choose, every figure on the Taxes screen and in the Schedule C export is the standard mileage method. If you and your CPA deduct actual costs instead, say so in Which car deduction: the mileage log is still exactly what you need, and the IRS-rate total stops being counted as your deduction.
Where the numbers come from
- You add a venue once (or the feed adds it for you, address included).
- Time all … drives (on Home whenever a venue needs it, and in My sites) fills in the drive using real driving routes, and a game page offers Time this drive for its own venue — or use the Route in Google Maps (one way) button to eyeball and adjust any route, then type what you actually drove. Google Maps shows the drive one way and the Miles box is the round trip, so double what it shows. With no address saved in Settings, the route starts from where your phone is. Your number always wins. The same lookup also records how long the drive takes, which is what lets a game tell you when to leave home and not just when to be there. RefTraq never turns your miles into minutes on its own: twenty miles of farm road and twenty miles across town on a Friday are not the same drive, so a venue nobody has measured says nothing rather than guessing.
- Log mileage for this game on a game's screen, from the game's day on, arrives prefilled: date, destination, purpose, and round-trip miles when the venue is measured. One tap to save. A venue nobody has measured yet arrives with Miles blank and Measure the drive to it, the same button the game chips offer. Log a drive asks Which game was it for? with today's games and the last 30 days' games that have no drive yet. A game that hasn't happened is never offered, because a drive is logged once you've made it. Type an earlier date and the games after it drop off the list.
What the IRS wants to see
A contemporaneous log: date, destination, business purpose, miles. That is exactly what each entry stores, and exactly what the Schedule C export prints in IRS-log format. Reconstructing a year from memory in April is how deductions get disallowed; logging at the game is how they survive.
Every drive's miles are a round trip, there and back, and the log says so: the mileage log page and its text file head the column Miles (round trip), and the export calls it miles_round_trip.
The export's log has one more column, recorded: blank for a drive you logged at the time, and "rebuilt from schedule on" a date for a drive rebuilt after the fact (below). A drive with no destination or no business purpose is named under the log, on the mileage log page and in the export, with a link to each drive on the page. Log a drive reminds you when the purpose is blank, and still saves without it.
Rebuilding a season's drives. Track → Rebuild drives from your schedule lists a season's days you worked or attended (a game, a chapter meeting or a clinic) with no drive logged and logs one round trip for each, from the distances RefTraq has measured. It offers every season that's over and, for the season you're in, the days before today; Taxes' "game days with no drive" line opens it on that season, and a day at a venue RefTraq hasn't measured is named with a way to measure it, never given miles. A rebuilt log is not the same as one written at the time. It rests on your assigner's schedule (where you were, and when) and the measured distance, and each rebuilt drive says so in its note and on every printed and exported mileage log, with one line saying how many drives were rebuilt and when. Show your preparer: whether it is enough is their call. For the season you're in, logging at the game is still the strong way, and the More driving you can record card lists this season's past days that still have no drive, even after you've logged some, until you tap Not now.
Both lists ask who drove. Before Log writes anything, that card's list and Rebuild ask whether you drove yourself to all of these, with no answer picked for you. Choose I rode with someone on some and mark the days you rode, or I rode every time: a ride is logged as a passenger trip at $0, because only the driver claims the miles. If that season's games aren't on your schedule yet, bring them in with Import (Arbiter's schedule export works): when it's done, Import offers to rebuild that season's drives, and Taxes does the same for a past year that has games and no drives logged.