To make mileage tracking as automated (and easy) as possible, TripLog has several features to help automatically categorize trips by activity (business, personal, etc.) and vehicle. The goal of this article is to help you customize your app for efficient, automatic categorization of your trips. In addition, if you have noticed your trips have been categorized incorrectly or attributed to the wrong vehicle, this article may help you discover the default setting that is causing the issue.

This article is divided in to two sections, activities and vehicles, to show the automatic default settings for each

Trips can be automatically categorized by activity (business, personal, etc.) due to three factors: vehicle default, location default, and business hours default. To categorize the activity of a trip, TripLog will follow these steps:

2. If the vehicle in use does not have a default activity, TripLog will then check if the starting or ending location of the trip has a default activity set. If either destination has a default activity set, TripLog will categorize the trip based on the location's default activity (if both starting and ending locations have default activities set, the tip will be categorized by the default activity of the ending location). The default activity of a location can be set via TripLog app > Menu > Locations > Press the location to edit > Set the 'Default Activity' to your preference > Save. 

In addition, if all previous trips to the ending location of the trip have been categorized as the same activity, the next trip to that location will also be categorized as that activity (e.g. if all trips to the location 'Office' are categorized as 'Business', the next trip to 'Office' will be categorized as 'Business'). This cycle can be broken by re-categorizing the activity of any trip that ends at that location via TripLog app > Press the trip to edit > Change the activity to correct it > Save.

3. If the both vehicle and locations do not have default activities, the trip will then be categorized by the default activity defined in your set business hours. The settings for business hours can be found under TripLog app > Menu > Settings (Android) or TripLog app > Menu > Auto Tracking On (iOS). If you are currently using manual-start GPS tracking or manual entry, you will need to enable auto tracking temporarily to access this setting. 

You can set your business hours to reflect the times and days when you are most likely to be driving for your business. Once you have defined which days (1) and hours (2) you will be driving for work, you can set TripLog to automatically categorize trips taken during these hours. During your business hours, trips will be categorized as the activity set in the 'Business Hours Activity' field while after hours trips will be categorized as the activity you can define in the 'After Hours Activity' field. You can (3) add additional timeframes for differing schedules. You can find a more detailed breakdown of this setup under Setting Your Work Hours to Auto Classify Trips

There are a few different methods that TripLog uses to automatically detect which vehicle you are driving as defined below:

1. If you are using the iBeacon or Bluetooth Auto Tracking, your TripLog app will automatically detect which vehicle you are using based on the signature of the beacon or Bluetooth connection and will attribute trips to the appropriate vehicle accordingly. Instructions on how to set up the iBeacon and Bluetooth auto-start settings can be found here: 

iBeacon: Android iOS
Bluetooth: Android iOS

2. If you are using another auto-tracking setting and you would like for all of your trips to be attributed to one vehicle unless otherwise specified, you can set a default vehicle for all of your future trips. To do so, please open TripLog app > Menu > Vehicles > Press on the three dots associated with the vehicle you wish to mark as the default vehicle > Mark as Default (Android) or open TripLog app > Menu > Vehicles > Press on the vehicle you wish to mark as the default vehicle > Mark as Default (iOS)

3. If no default vehicle has been set, the trip will automatically be attributed to the vehicle driven in the previous trip. This can be changed via manually editing a trip by opening TripLog app > press the trip to edit > Change the vehicle to the desired vehicle > save.