Business Trip Logger

Okay, time to get some IP off my chest and let “the resistance” conquer my “lizard brain”.

Build something you need and others will need it too, right? I must lose thousands to the tax man because I’m too lazy to keep a log book of all my business trips. So, the juniors at New Media Labs have built an iPhone application that logs your business trips to a web site (http://triplogger.info) via a web service. At the end of the financial year you can download a CSV of all your business trips and submit to SARS.

We would love you to try the app out. Hopefully you find it useful too. Feedback would also be highly appreciated.

Steps:

1) Download the “Business Trip Logger” from http://itunes.apple.com/za/app/business-trip-logger/id373066501?mt=8 or search for “Business Trip Logger” in the app store and install the app.

2)      The app requires you to register on the website. This is easiest done directly from the phone – a browser will be launched from the app. All that is required is your email address and a password (the phone id is already sent through to the website). Registration is necessary so that we know which incoming messages (trips) are yours and so that you can download your CSV from the website to submit to SARS at the end of the year. Also, local storage on the phone was not considered an option because the system allows for more than one phone per account. Also if you lost your phone, and we were using local storage, you would lose all your trips too.

3)      Start logging all your trips. SARS require a client name, reason for trip and start odometer and end odometer reading.

4)      All client names and trip reasons are stored so you can select those from the select boxes on similar or repeat trips. You can also delete and edit these in the traditional iPhone fashion.

5)      The end odometer reading must obviously be greater than the start odometer reading.

6)      If you have started the trip the app will expect you to close (end) the trip.

7)      You can also add and edit trips on the website.

Since we are focusing on iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile (6.1 and 6.5 and 7) expect to see this app built for a number of different phone operating systems (good practice for our juniors (Chris Goosen who finished the iPhone app and Ashraf Vanker who built the website and the web services).

Why didn’t we store the whole trip’s GPS points?

At the time when we started building the app, multi-tasking wasn’t possible so we figured we’d end up with a whole lot of broken trips that would leave questionable results.

There are lots of trip loggers on the app store, why did you make another?

Practice for our juniors. This app is specifically designed for submission to SARS.

Last thoughts: we have noticed some improvements we could make to the usability.