Your Mileage Settings in Backbuild Miles

Mileage settings is the screen that decides how much Backbuild Miles does on its own. One switch on it governs whether the app records your driving at all, and the choices beneath it decide where a captured drive lands and how it is presented back to you. This page teaches you what each control changes, how to turn recording off and be certain it stopped, and where the rest of the setup lives.

Open it from the Settings tab at the far right of the bottom bar. Every choice here belongs to you, not to an entity: if you work across several entities, these preferences follow you into all of them, and they follow you onto a new phone when you sign in.

Automatic Tracking: The One Switch That Matters

After this section you will be able to stop and start automatic recording, and confirm which state you are actually in.

At the top of the screen is Automatic tracking. When it is on, Backbuild Miles detects that a drive has begun and records it without you opening the app or pressing anything. That is the whole point of the product, so a fresh installation starts with it on.

Turning it off is the complete stop. It is not a pause, not a filter, and not a setting that applies only while the app is open. With the switch off, the app releases its hold on your phone's location straight away, stops watching for drives, and creates no new trips. It stays that way through closing the app, the phone killing the app in the background, and a restart of the phone: a reboot does not turn recording back on.

If you switch it off in the middle of a drive, the part already recorded is closed off and kept, and it appears in your trip review queue like any other trip. Recording stops at the moment you moved the switch; the rest of that journey is not recorded, and the trip is not left open to be added to later. If you would rather not keep the part that was recorded, delete that trip from the Trips tab.

The screen is explicit about which state you are in, and it uses three separate signals so you are never guessing:

• The row reads Tracking is on or Tracking is off in words, not just as a coloured switch.
• The switch itself moves and changes colour.
• When it is off, a warning line appears underneath: Drives will not be recorded while this is off. That line is there deliberately. Turning recording off is easy to do and easy to forget, and a month of missing business mileage is expensive to reconstruct.

Your choice is stored with your account and on the phone, so it survives closing the app, restarting the phone, and a software update. If you turn recording off, it stays off until you turn it back on.

Turning Recording Off for a While

There are good reasons to switch it off: a holiday, a stretch of personal driving you would rather not have logged at all, lending the phone to someone else, or a week when you are not driving for work. Switch it off, and switch it back on when you need it. Nothing you have already recorded is touched, and your vehicles, entities and rules are all still there when you return.

The one thing to remember is that a drive taken while the switch is off cannot be recovered afterwards. There is no record to import. If you realise afterwards that a trip mattered, add it by hand from the Trips tab.

If Something Goes Wrong While You Are Changing It

Two things have to agree when you flip the switch: your account setting, and the phone itself. The screen tells you when they do not.

• If the change cannot be saved to your account, the screen says so and leaves the switch where it was. It never shows you a change that did not happen.
• If the change was saved but the phone could not be told, the screen says that too, and asks you to reopen Backbuild Miles so the two can agree.
• If you are offline, the change is held on the phone and sent when you are back on a connection.

Turning recording off is always applied to the phone straight away, even when the rest of the change is still in flight. Failing to stop is the expensive direction, so the app never waits to stop.

Setup and Review

After this section you will know what each of the four links leads to.

The middle of the screen collects the things you set up once and then revisit occasionally.

• Re-run setup and permissions. Walks the first-run setup again. This is the place to go when recording has stopped working and you suspect Android has taken a permission back, which it does to apps it thinks you have stopped using.
• Trips needing review. Opens the queue of captured drives that have not been assigned to an entity yet. See Clearing Your Trip Inbox.
• Classification rules and odometer reminders. Teaches the app to classify drives for you by working hours, named places and frequent routes, and sets when it should prompt you for an odometer reading.
• Dashcam. Cameras, recording resolution, how much storage the rolling buffer may use, and how long kept footage is retained. Dashcam recording is off by default and footage stays on the phone.

Distance Units

After this section you will know what the units choice is for.

Three options: Automatic (locale), which follows the region your phone is set to, Miles, or Kilometers.

Set it to Automatic unless you have a reason not to. The usual reason is a phone whose region does not match where you drive, or a preference for reading kilometres while filing a deduction that is calculated in miles.

Default Destination

After this section you will be able to send new trips to the right entity automatically.

In Backbuild Miles, a trip belongs to an entity: your personal records, or a business you drive for. The default destination decides where a newly captured trip goes when nothing else has already answered that question.

The list has one row for Ask every time, then one row for each entity you belong to. Your personal records are listed as Personal.

• Ask every time is the right choice if you drive for more than one business and the split is genuinely mixed. Every captured drive waits in the trip review queue until you say where it belongs.
• Choosing an entity is the right choice if nearly all of your driving is for one of them. New trips route there on their own, and you can still move any individual trip afterwards.

You can only choose an entity you are currently a member of. If your membership of an entity ends, the app tells you plainly that it is no longer available as a default and asks you to pick another one, rather than silently sending your mileage somewhere you can no longer see it.

Setting a default is not a lock. A default answers the question so you do not have to; it never prevents you from answering it differently for a particular drive.

What These Settings Do Not Do

Worth stating plainly, because these are the assumptions people most often arrive with:

• They do not delete anything. Changing any setting on this screen leaves every recorded trip, vehicle and receipt exactly as it was.
• They are not per-entity. Switching entity in the header does not give you a different set of these preferences.
• They do not change the tax treatment of a trip. Classification does that, and it lives in the trip itself and in your classification rules.

Common Questions

If I turn tracking off, do I lose the trips already recorded?

No. The switch controls whether new drives are detected. Everything already captured stays in your trips list and your reports.

Does turning tracking off save battery?

Yes. With the switch off the app is not watching for the start of a drive, so the work that costs battery is not being done.

I turned tracking off. Why is the app still on my phone doing something?

Backbuild Miles still syncs trips you have already recorded, and still shows you your dashboard and reports. What it stops doing is detecting and recording new drives.

Does the setting follow me to a new phone?

Yes. These preferences belong to your account, so signing in on a new phone brings them with you.

I picked kilometres and my dashboard still says miles. Why?

The distance-unit preference is not yet applied across every screen. It is saved, and the screens that read it will honour it, but several still present distances in miles regardless. If you rely on kilometres, read the exported figures rather than the on-screen summaries for now.

Can I set a default vehicle here?

Not on this screen. A vehicle is chosen per entity, and the quickest way to get it right automatically is to pair the vehicle with your car's Bluetooth: see Pairing Your Vehicle.

Where do I stop recording for one drive rather than for good?

Leave automatic tracking on and end the drive from the live drive screen, or reclassify it as personal afterwards. See Recording a Drive.

Where to Go Next

• Clearing Your Trip Inbox shows you how captured drives are assigned to an entity and classified.
• Pairing Your Vehicle gets the right vehicle onto a trip without you choosing it.
• Reports and Exports turns the recorded year into the substantiation record you file.