The approach depends on whether your employees drive their own cars between jobs or you own company vehicles. Most mobile cleaning businesses use one or the other, and some use a mix. The tracking method is different for each.

If employees use personal vehicles, the simplest approach is reimbursing them at the IRS standard mileage rate. For 2024, that rate is 67 cents per mile. The employee tracks their business miles driven, submits a log, and you reimburse them. As long as you have an accountable plan in place (meaning employees document the business purpose, date, and miles for each trip), the reimbursement is tax-free to the employee and deductible for your business. No payroll taxes on either side.

For tracking those miles, use an app. QuickBooks Online has a built-in mileage tracker that uses GPS to log trips automatically. Other options like MileIQ or Everlance work well too. The key is that employees track trips as they happen. A cleaning crew hitting four or five houses a day across Dodge County generates a lot of short trips that are nearly impossible to reconstruct from memory at the end of the week. The app runs in the background and captures it all.

Have employees classify each trip as business or personal at the end of the day while it’s still fresh. Most apps make this a simple swipe. Set a weekly deadline for submitting mileage so it doesn’t pile up and become a headache for everyone.

If you own company vehicles, skip the mileage rate entirely and track actual expenses per vehicle. That means fuel, oil changes, tires, insurance, registration, repairs, and depreciation. The easiest way to handle fuel is a dedicated fuel card for each vehicle. Those transactions feed directly into QuickBooks, and you can tag each one to the correct vehicle. Maintenance receipts get logged the same way.

With company vehicles you also want a simple log of which employee drove which vehicle each day. This helps with accountability and with figuring out why one van costs twice as much in fuel as the others.

Whichever method you use, keep the records clean and consistent. The IRS can disallow mileage deductions or reimbursement write-offs if your documentation is sloppy. “We drove a lot” is not a mileage log. You need dates, starting and ending locations, miles driven, and the business purpose. Apps handle this automatically, which is why they’re worth the small cost.

One thing to watch out for: commuting miles from an employee’s home to your office or first job site are not deductible business miles. But miles driven from one client location to the next during the workday absolutely are. For cleaning businesses where crews go site to site all day, the bulk of driving qualifies as business mileage.

If tracking mileage and reimbursements feels like one more thing you don’t have time for, a bookkeeper can set up the system and process reimbursements as part of your regular bookkeeping cycle. Our Wisconsin small business bookkeeping services include helping owners like you build simple processes that stay consistent without eating into your day. The goal is a system your team actually follows, not a perfect spreadsheet nobody updates.