Adelo Drive
A mileage log is a tax record. Most of them are a spreadsheet.
Reimbursement stays tax-free only while the record behind it carries four things: how far, what date, where to, and what for. Miss one and the money you paid becomes wages on your driver's W-2 — reported, withheld on, and taxed on both sides. Adelo Drive is built backwards from that sentence.
Works on its own. Alongside Adelo CRM, a completed route becomes a mileage log with no second entry.
Why this is not a convenience product
Three of four is a disallowed deduction
The four elements are not a best practice. They are the test.
Reg. §1.274-5T(b)(6) asks for amount, time, place and business purpose. A log with miles, a date and two addresses has three of them, and that log fails — the same way a blank page fails. What separates a reimbursement that stays out of payroll from one that becomes taxable wages is usually the fourth element, and the fourth element is the one no GPS can supply. Somebody has to say what the drive was for.
So Adelo Drive will not record a business trip without a purpose. Not a warning, not a nag on a report at month end: the database refuses the row. That is an unusual thing for a product to do to its own user, and it is the single decision this whole application is built around. A field of GPS coordinates with no stated purpose is a very precise record of a car moving, and an examiner disallows it as fast as a blank page.
Every trip is priced at the rate in force on the day it was driven, and the rate is stored on the trip. Rates move mid-year — the federal business rate did in 2026 — and a product that prices a January trip at today’s number produces a log that disagrees with itself the moment anyone checks.
Two programs
Cents per mile, or FAVR
They are different tax instruments, not two settings for the same one.
Cents per mile
One rate for the company, applied to business miles. Simple to run and simple to check, and for a team that drives moderate mileage it is usually the right answer. The federal rate is the default; an organization can set its own.
FAVR — fixed and variable rate
A driver who does high mileage in a car they own is carrying two different costs, and one flat rate serves neither well. FAVR splits them. The variable half is per business mile — fuel at local prices, divided by the standard vehicle’s economy, plus maintenance and tyres. The fixed half is a monthly allowance covering depreciation, insurance, registration and taxes.
The fixed half is priced on the postal code where the car is kept overnight, not where the driver works — because that is what insurance is priced on, and a driver who lives in one place and covers another is the normal case. Business-use percentage applies to the fixed half only. Applying it to the variable rate as well is a plausible-looking error that silently underpays every driver on the program, since that rate is already per business mile.
FAVR carries conditions — a cost cap the IRS publishes annually, a minimum number of drivers, limits on how many can be management. Adelo Drive checks them and reports each failure as a separate finding, because an allowance that fails its conditions is wages for every driver on the plan, not just for the one who tripped it.
Automatic capture
Four switches, and the driver owns all four
Nothing in the product turns capture on: not an administrator, not the employer, not us.
A driver can enter every drive by hand and be reimbursed exactly the same. Capture is an offer, and the app says so on the screen where the driver decides. When it is on, four conditions must all hold before a single drive is recorded — and they are enforced in the database, not by the screens. A drive that does not satisfy them is refused, not filtered.
- Consent — given by the driver, against a disclosure whose version is recorded. Rewording it without issuing a new version would leave a record saying somebody agreed to sentences they never saw.
- A switch — theirs, off at any moment, for an afternoon or for good.
- A schedule — the days and hours they set. Outside it nothing is captured unless they have separately chosen to allow it.
- A pause that expires — because a pause you have to remember to undo becomes a month of missing mileage.
A recorded drive holds when it started and ended, where it started and ended, and how far it was. That is the whole list. There is no route line, no speed and no live position — not hidden from a screen, but absent from the database. There is no column in this product that could hold a movement trail, and the migration that created these tables refuses to apply if one has appeared.
For the person being asked to switch it on
What your employer sees, and what they never do
The same words as the consent screen in the app, because you should be able to compare them.
Seen
Drives you mark business. The date, both ends, the distance, and what you said it was for. That is the mileage log they reimburse from.
Drives you mark commute. Home to work and back. Rev. Rul. 99-7 makes these non-reimbursable, so they are worth nothing — they are on the log because leaving them off is how a log stops adding up.
Never
Drives you mark personal. Deleted where they stand. The places and coordinates are removed the moment you tap it. What remains is that a drive existed and was discarded, so that “my August is missing” stays an answerable question — and nothing about where the car went.
Drives you have not classified. Yours alone until you decide. Not a setting: row-level security in PostgreSQL permits exactly one reader, and no policy granting a manager, an administrator or an account owner exists on that table.
Anything driven while the switch is off. Never recorded at all. It does not reach Adelo, so it cannot reach them.
Where you are right now. Not stored anywhere. There is no column in this product that could hold it and no screen that could show it.
Adelo Drive is not a workforce-monitoring product and is not sold as one. A company that wants to know where its people are will not find it here. The full statement is in the privacy notice, which distinguishes what each of our two products does — Adelo CRM keeps no record of where anyone goes: only a home a rep chooses to save, and a day’s starting point when the rep chooses one.
The month end
A period closes once, and stays closed
What finance needs is not a spreadsheet export. It is a record that still means the same thing in two years.
A driver submits a period; an approver sees the trips, the miles, the rate applied to each one and anything that needs attention before it can go. Approval is a decision with a name and a timestamp attached, and a submitted period is not editable afterwards — a corrected trip is a new trip that names the one it corrects, so the log shows the correction rather than quietly replacing history.
Where a program requires proof of the insurance it is reimbursing, the documents live with the driver’s enrolment and expire on a date the product knows about. Cover lapsing is not an administrative nicety on a FAVR plan: it means the cost being reimbursed has stopped existing.
Pricing
Per driver, per month, published
Nobody else in this category publishes one. Cardata's pricing page carries no figures, mBurse none, Motus only the model. You should not have to book a call to find out what software costs.
Essentials
Cents per mile, substantiated to the four elements.
$12
per driver, per month
billed annually · $15 month to month
Talk to us- Automatic drive capture — the driver’s switch, schedule and pause
- Manual entry, always, with no loss of reimbursement
- Business, commute and personal classification
- Priced at the IRS rate in force on the day of the trip
- Vehicles and odometer readings
- Approvals, monthly reports and export
Most teams
Pro
Your own rate, or an accountable car allowance.
$21
per driver, per month
billed annually · $26 month to month
Talk to usEverything in Essentials, plus:
- The accountable car allowance, reconciled every month
- Your own cents-per-mile rate instead of the federal one
- State reimbursement rules — all 51 jurisdictions
- Insurance and registration documents, with expiry reminders
- Duplicate detection
- Audit-grade and payroll exports
- API and webhooks
FAVR
A fixed and variable rate program, administered.
$32
per driver, per month
billed annually · $39 month to month
Talk to usEverything in Pro, plus:
- Enrollment, garaging postal code and standard vehicle profiles
- Per-ZIP cost basis — insurance, registration, taxes, local fuel
- Monthly reconciliation of both halves
- The eligibility gate, checked continuously
- Required insurance documents, enforced rather than requested
Requires at least five enrolled drivers, as the IRS does.
Founding customers pay $10, $17 and $26 a driver on a twelve-month term. No implementation fee, no services minimum, and no charge for a program you set up yourself in the product. Drivers who only need to be reimbursed — not to administer anything — are drivers, and they are the only thing counted.
Why these numbers, since you can check them
The vendors who publish a price are mileage trackers that administer no program: Driversnote at $11, MileIQ at $11.66 on an annual plan, TripLog at $4.99. The one comparable that both administers and publishes is CompanyMileage, at $9.50 a user for mileage and $12 for their full suite. Essentials sits at the top of that band because it does what a tracker does and substantiates properly on top of it.
FAVR sits well above it because running a FAVR program is the work — per-postal-code cost basis, an eligibility gate whose failure turns the allowance into wages for every driver on the plan, and insurance documents that expire while nobody is looking.
And the floor under all three is what they remove. A driver reimbursed $700 a month carries around $640 a year of employer payroll tax if the substantiation fails — before the driver’s own tax on money they were told was a reimbursement. FAVR at $32 a month is $384 a year against that. We would rather you did that division yourself than take our word for the saving. Competitor figures checked 7 September 2026.
Before you ask
What it does not do
This is an early product. Here is the part that is not built, said plainly rather than discovered later.
- It does not locate anybody. No live map of drivers, no geofence, no arrival alerts. Not a roadmap item — the schema has nowhere to put it.
- It does not run your payroll. It produces the substantiated record and the amount; paying it happens in your system.
- It does not price insurance for you. On a FAVR program the fixed half either comes from your existing vendor’s file or is computed from cost data you supply.
- It does not decide whether a home office is a principal place of business. That flag has a real tax consequence under Rev. Rul. 99-7, it is yours to set, and every trip records what it was set to at the time.
Adelo Drive
Bring us the program you are running now
Most teams arrive with an existing vendor file or a flat monthly allowance and a suspicion that neither is substantiated. That file is the fastest way to find out — we will tell you what it covers, what it does not, and whether the arithmetic holds, before you are asked for anything.
Adelo Drive is sold on its own or alongside Adelo CRM. Every price above is per driver, per month, billed annually.