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 $40 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. (Your pay is per game; your miles are per drive.)
- The rate is snapshotted per entry. Each trip stores the IRS rate for its year, so old entries never silently recompute when the rate changes.
Where the numbers come from
- You add a venue once (or the feed adds it for you, address included).
- Compute distances automatically fills in the drive using real driving routes — or use the Route in Google Maps button to eyeball and adjust any route, then type what you actually drove. Your number always wins.
- Log mileage for this game on any game screen arrives prefilled: date, destination, purpose, round-trip miles. One tap to save.
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.