Best Business Mileage Tracker in 2026  

Automated mileage tracking has become more important for UK businesses since the Approved Mileage Allowance Payment (AMAP) rate rose to 55p a mile from 6 April 2026 (HMRC confirmed the change in May 2026 and backdated it to the start of the tax year). That’s a meaningful shift for any business that reimburses drivers for using their own car or van—it means your mileage records need to reflect the new rate structure, and HMRC expects them to. Employers who fall short risk rejected claims and penalties if their records get audited.

But compliance isn’t just about logging miles automatically. Employers also have a duty of care to check that drivers hold valid licences, insurance, and MOT (the annual roadworthiness test required for vehicles over three years old) certificates. We tested five automated mileage tracking options against these updated requirements. Whether you’re comparing dedicated apps or broader expense platforms, the criteria below apply either way.

HMRC compliance criteria for automated mileage tracking in 2026

Before comparing individual options, here’s what HMRC actually requires from your mileage records, and what’s changed since the rate update.

The May 2026 AMAP rate increase to 55p

• New rate: 55p a mile for the first 10,000 business miles, up from 45p.
• Above 10,000 miles: stays at 25p, unchanged.
• Context: the 45p rate had been frozen since 2011 — the first change in over a decade.
• Timing: announced in May 2026, backdated to 6 April 2026 (the start of the 2026/27 tax year).
• What automated tracking needs to do: apply the correct rate automatically, based on a driver’s cumulative mileage within the tax year (6 April to 5 April), rather than a flat rate across all journeys.

This works well when your option tracks cumulative mileage in the background. But if you’re relying on a spreadsheet, it’s easy to apply the wrong rate once a driver crosses the 10,000-mile mark partway through the year. For a full breakdown of how the new rates work, see our HMRC mileage rates 2026–27 guide.

Required record fields

HMRC doesn’t mandate a specific file format, but your records need to include five core fields for every business journey:

• Date of the trip.
• Destination start and end addresses.
• Business purpose: a brief description of why the journey was made.
• Miles driven: the actual distance, not an estimate.
• Vehicle used: particularly important if drivers use more than one.

A few things worth knowing:

• These requirements apply just as much to self-employed people filing a Self Assessment return as they do to employees claiming Mileage Allowance Relief.
• GOV.UK’s guidance on record-keeping is clear that contemporaneous records—logged at or near the time of travel—carry far more weight than a log reconstructed at year-end.
• A lot of businesses don’t realise this until they’re facing an enquiry, and rebuilding months of journeys from memory is a genuinely painful task. That’s exactly the gap automated tracking is built to close.

Vehicle document compliance: driving licence, insurance, MOT, and road tax

If your employees drive for business, you’ve got a legal duty of care to make sure their cars or vans are roadworthy and properly insured. That means checking:

• A valid UK driving licence with the correct category for the vehicle being driven.
• Business-use motor insurance.
• A current MOT (the annual roadworthiness test for vehicles over three years old) certificate.
• Valid road tax (Vehicle Excise Duty, or VED).

Good to know:

• This is usually a one-off setup task once you’ve got a system in place, but it needs revisiting whenever a licence, MOT, or insurance policy is due for renewal — so it’s not entirely “set and forget”.
• Skipping these checks can expose employers to real liability. If an employee causes an accident while driving on expired insurance or without a valid licence, the employer may face consequences under health and safety law (worth a quick check with your legal team on exactly what that looks like for your organisation).

Despite the risk, most automated mileage tracking options treat vehicle document management as someone else’s problem. That’s a meaningful gap, and it’s one of the main reasons we built document verification directly into Capture Expense.

Best automated car mileage tracking options for businesses, compared

The table below compares the three dedicated automated mileage-tracking options we tested most closely against the criteria above. Two broader expense management platforms, Fyle and Spendesk, are covered separately further down, since they take a different approach to mileage as part of a wider spend management suite.

Capture Expense is the only option in this comparison offering integrated vehicle document verification alongside automated mileage tracking.

Capture Expense

Capture Expense is a UK-built expense and mileage management platform designed around HMRC compliance from the ground up—built for finance teams, fleet managers, and HR departments that need automated mileage tracking and vehicle compliance in one place.

Features:

• Vehicle document verification: administrators can require drivers to upload their driving licence, insurance certificate, MOT status, and road tax confirmation before logging business mileage, with expiry dates tracked and alerts fired before documents lapse.
• GPS and motion sensor tracking: automatic trip detection, with journeys classified as business, commute, or private.
• Cumulative AMAP threshold: the 55p/25p split is applied automatically per tax year as drivers cross the 10,000-mile mark.
• HMRC-ready exports: all five required fields, available in PDF, CSV, and XLSX.
• Carbon tracking: CO₂ emissions calculated per journey, useful for Scope 3 reporting.

For a deeper look at how the vehicle mileage and document features work together, see the vehicle mileage tracking page.

MileIQ

MileIQ is one of the most widely recognised automated mileage trackers globally, well suited to self-employed professionals and sole traders who want simple daily logging.

Features:

• Swipe-based classification: swipe right for business, left for personal, with onboarding that takes minutes.
• Automatic trip detection: runs reliably in the background on both iOS and Android.
• UK reporting template: produces exports for UK tax purposes.
• Multi-vehicle tracking: supported within a single account.

Pricing and plan structures change frequently, so it’s worth checking current terms on the MileIQ official site before committing. MileIQ was originally built for the US market, and while UK support exists, AMAP threshold tracking needs manual configuration rather than being applied automatically.

Find out more

Driversnote

Driversnote is a mature automated mileage tracking option with solid UK support, well suited to small businesses and self-employed drivers who want reliable, no-frills tracking with optional hardware.

Features:

• GPS plus Bluetooth beacons: small devices left in your vehicle that trigger tracking automatically when your phone connects.
• HMRC-compliant reporting: supports the UK tax year (6 April to 5 April) with exports covering all required fields.
• Team management: administrators can view and manage mileage across a small fleet.

Pricing varies by plan and current promotional offers, with up-to-date terms available on the Driversnote official site. It’s worth double-checking AMAP threshold handling against the new 55p rate before you rely on it.

Find out more

Fyle (Sage expense management)

Fyle, now operating under the Sage Expense Management brand, is a broader expense management platform aimed at mid-sized finance teams already using Sage or NetSuite for accounting.

Features:

• Google Maps mileage calculation: enter start and end locations and the distance is worked out automatically, capturing trips retrospectively rather than via GPS auto-detection.
• Automated policy enforcement: out-of-policy mileage claims are flagged before submission.
• Accounting integrations: connects with NetSuite, QuickBooks, Xero, and Sage.

Fyle doesn’t offer automatic GPS trip detection the way dedicated mileage options do, so it depends on driver discipline, and there’s no UK-specific AMAP threshold tracking built in.

Find out more

Spendesk

Spendesk is a European spend management platform best suited to UK businesses with 20+ employees that want to bring mileage claims into a broader spend management platform.

Features:

• Unified spend control: mileage claims feed into the same approval workflows as corporate cards and invoices, with per-employee or per-department budgets.
• Multi-level approval chains: real-time visibility into pending and approved claims.
• GDPR-compliant, EU-hosted data: addresses data residency concerns some UK businesses have with US-hosted alternatives.

Mileage tracking isn’t Spendesk’s primary focus, so trips are logged manually and AMAP rate handling may need manual configuration to reflect the 55p/25p split correctly.

Find out more

How to run a two-week evaluation

Don’t choose an automated mileage tracking option on feature lists alone. Run a structured pilot instead:

• Install two or three candidate options alongside your current process.
• Drive normally for two weeks — don’t alter your routine to suit the tool.
• Compare missed-trip rates across each option.
• Time your weekly review: how long does classifying and annotating all trips take?
• Export a test report and check it contains every field HMRC requires.
• Check battery impact across a typical workday.
• If vehicle document compliance matters to your organisation, test whether the tool can enforce it before drivers log miles.

The option that captures the most trips with the least manual correction, while still producing audit-ready exports, is usually the right choice. A polished dashboard isn’t much help if you’re still reconstructing missing journeys every Friday.

Automated mileage tracking with Capture Expense

There’s no single ‘best’ among the automated car mileage tracking options for businesses covered here. The right choice comes down to what your organisation actually needs to manage, not just how accurately it logs miles. If vehicle document compliance is part of your duty of care, that’s the deciding factor worth weighing most heavily—Capture Expense is currently the only option in this comparison built to handle licences, insurance, MOT, and road tax alongside HMRC-ready mileage exports.

Run the two-week evaluation outlined above before you commit. A tool only earns its place if it captures trips automatically and accurately, produces audit-ready exports, and doesn’t create extra admin at review time. If you’d like to see how the automated mileage tracking and vehicle document verification work together in Capture Expense, we’re happy to walk you through it in a demo.