Web application for calculating travel mileage

January 3rd, 2007 · 7 Comments

Last week I started trying to tally all my business-related travel mileage for the year, and was struggling to do it in a non-tedious fashion. The key problem was that I haven’t really kept good track. It’s quite rare that I think about it when I get in my car, and even more rare that I remember to write down an odometer reading when I return. Although when I say “rare” I really mean “never”.

However, I do keep good track of my meetings and travel in Google Calendar, and started delving into the API to try to figure out a way to automate the process of extracting scores of entries into a spreadsheet and cross-referencing mileage results from Google Maps.

After a few hours of hacking I had something pretty decent, and decided to continue working on it so that others could easily use it if needed. So here it is: a web application for calculating travel mileage. You can use it to calculate mileage for any number of start/destination addresses and download the results to a spreadsheet. If you use Google Calendar, you can pull events from a specific date range and calculate mileage using the locations you entered for an event.

Let me know what you think — questions, suggestions, etc.

Many thanks to Doug Karr for putting together the design and being a beta tester.

Tags: Business, business_expenses, google_calendar, google_maps, travel_mileage, web_application

7 responses so far ↓

1 Doug Karr // Jan 3, 2007 at 10:01 pm

Thanks, Ade! Anytime!!! I already have a handful of clicks from you.
2 hiroki // Jan 4, 2007 at 11:13 am

That’s a really neat idea.
3 ade // Jan 4, 2007 at 11:41 am

Thanks Hiroki. I can only assume you had already thoroughly deconstructed every Ajax request before forming your opinion.
4 Tom Murphy // Jan 5, 2007 at 12:11 pm

Abe, this is absolutely superb!

May I make two suggestions for improvements?

First, a way, once your program has pulled the data from G-Calendar, to be able to click (in your program) a link that takes me directly back to that day’s calendar in G-Cal. Sometimes I was lazy and just entered in my calendar “meeting with joe”. If I could click a link in your program to go back to that particular date, I could then add Joe’s address and re-run your program, thus getting the mileage from my place to Joe’s. Does that make any sense?

Second, a way to mark when a particular trip was round trip. Your program currently tells me that I drove 4.5 miles to Anne’s office… but some days I go to her office… and then come directly back to mine. A radio button or something that said “round trip” would allow me to get the actual “true” mileage for that meeting… there and back. Again, does that make any sense?

Thanks for the work you have done so far… whether you make these changes or not, I still find it to be extremely helpful!

Good work!!!

Tom
5 ade // Jan 5, 2007 at 9:43 pm

Thanks Tom. Two very good suggestions — I’ve added both to my dev list.
6 Kevin // Jan 6, 2007 at 2:11 pm

Can this be used with a Calendar that has been subscribed to in Google Calendar? For example, I mainly use 30boxes as my calendar and enter in appointments and addresses and such. I have subscribed to this in Google Calendar and there is a link to the XML file. Not “private XML” exists.

When I enter in this URL, the Calculator Mashup gives me an error.

thanks
7 Quadsk8 // Jan 7, 2007 at 3:48 pm

Hello Ade,

It works for me with adresses in the Netherlands. My suggestion (just like the roundtrip radio button) a metric conversion radio button. (or do you make a separate website called Kilometerage Calculator for this?)

thanks
Lawrence

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