Mileage log for independent consultants
A home office one day, a client site the next. Your calendar holds the engagements. Kilevo turns them into a log built for Schedule C.
Fewer miles, higher stakes
A consultant does not rack up a sales rep's mileage. You might drive to a client site three days a week and work from home the rest. Nine thousand business miles a year is a realistic figure — a $6,525 deduction at the 2026 IRS rate of 72.5 cents a mile. Because most consultants are 1099 or run through an LLC, those miles are a genuine Schedule C deduction, not a suspended employee expense.
The stakes are in the substantiation, not the volume. A handful of large, repeated client drives is exactly the pattern an examiner probes, precisely because it repeats.
The home office is your pivot point
If a room in your home is used regularly and exclusively for the practice, and it is where you do your administrative work, your home is your principal place of business. Then the drive to a client is business travel, not a commute. Without that qualifying office, the first drive of the day is usually personal. The business miles vs commuting page works through it.
The one-year rule on a long engagement
Consultants hit a rule others rarely do. A client site you expect to work at for one year or less is a temporary work site, and driving there from home is deductible when you also have a regular place of work — your home office. But if the engagement is realistically expected to run beyond a year, that site stops being temporary, and the drive to it becomes a nondeductible commute. A long retainer can quietly cross that line mid-engagement.
How Kilevo builds the log
Your engagements live in a calendar: on-site days, kickoffs, workshops, steering meetings. Kilevo reads that calendar — Google, Outlook or an ICS feed — and turns each appointment with a client address into a round trip from your home office. The engagement name in the title becomes the business purpose, captured on the day, not reconstructed at year-end. It exports an annual PDF report, per vehicle, with the date, destination and purpose on every line.
What it will not do
Kilevo has no GPS, no mobile app and no receipt scanning. It reads a calendar and nothing else. A remote engagement conducted over video is zero miles. An on-site day you never put in the calendar is a trip that will not exist. When a client address arrives without a city, Kilevo picks the closest match to your home, flags it as guessed, and one click confirms it for every appointment with the same title.
The IRS wants a contemporaneous log — date, mileage, destination, purpose — and Kilevo records exactly that as your engagements run. Whether a given engagement is temporary, and whether your home office qualifies, are judgment calls for a tax professional (the Schedule C mileage page is the place to start). Then create a free account and import a quarter of engagements to see the log build.
