Export everything before you switch, and keep the export whether or not the move goes smoothly. That is the entire rule, and almost every lost mileage log comes from breaking it — the phone was traded in, the free trial lapsed, the account was closed, the app was deleted to free up space, and the records went with it. The tax authority’s retention expectations do not care which app you were using when the driving happened, and a log you cannot produce is a log you do not have.
What do I do first when I am changing phone or app?
Export your data out of the old system before anything else happens, while you still have a working login on a working device. That means before the trade-in, before the factory reset, before you cancel the subscription and before you let a lapsed plan lock you into read-only or worse. Exports are cheap and take minutes; recovering data from an account you no longer have access to ranges from tedious to impossible.
Get the export off the phone too. A CSV sitting in the device’s downloads folder is not a backup of the device — send it to cloud storage or to your own email, somewhere that survives the handset. This is the same weekly export habit the end-of-shift routine post recommends, and a phone change is simply the moment it stops being optional.
Why is the mileage log the hardest thing to rebuild?
Because it is the only record with no second copy anywhere in the world. Your income exists in platform statements and in your bank account. Your expenses exist on receipts, card statements and in suppliers’ systems. Every one of those can be reconstructed with enough patience. The mileage log cannot: no platform recorded the unpaid drive to the pickup, the repositioning between apps, or the drive home from the last drop-off, and your bank has never heard of any of it.
It is also, as covered elsewhere on this blog, usually the largest deduction on a driver’s return. So the single most valuable and least replaceable record you own is the one most likely to be sitting in an app on a phone you are about to hand to a stranger in a shop. That combination is worth ten minutes of care.
What exactly should I export before I switch?
Everything the old system will give you, in the most boring format it offers. CSV and Excel files open anywhere, in ten years, without the original app existing — a proprietary backup file does not. If the export offers a date range, take the whole history rather than the current tax year, because the retention period your tax authority expects usually runs well past the filing deadline.
Take the platform-side records at the same time, since you are already in the habit for an hour. Downloading a year of statements from a delivery or rideshare app is much easier while your account is active than after you have stopped driving for them.
- The full trip log: dates, distances, endpoints, classifications and business purposes
- Expenses with their receipt images, which are often a separate export from the expense rows
- Income records by platform, including tips and anything you entered manually
- Invoices and client records if you do work that is billed rather than dispatched
- Vehicle records: which vehicle covered which trips, and any odometer readings you noted
- Your platform statements and annual summaries, downloaded from each app directly
How do I match old records to new without double-counting?
Pick a changeover date and give every day exactly one owner. The day before the switch belongs to the old system; the day after belongs to the new one; the day of the switch belongs to whichever was actually running, and if both were running, delete one side’s trips rather than keeping both. Duplicated trips are worse than missing ones, because a log that contains the same journey twice is a log that overstates a deduction — and once an inspector finds one duplicate they will look for more.
If your new app can import history, import it and then check the boundary week specifically rather than the whole file. Duplicates cluster at the changeover. If it cannot import, do not retype a year of trips: keep the old export as the record for the period it covers and let the new system own everything after the changeover date. Two clean files covering consecutive periods are perfectly respectable evidence; there is no requirement that a year of records live in a single application.
Where should the old export live afterwards?
In your own storage, named so that a stranger could understand it, and kept for as long as your tax authority expects records to be kept. A folder per tax year with the exports, the platform statements and — once filed — the return itself is the whole system. Name files with the period and the source in them: a file called "export.csv" is a file you will not recognise in three years.
Keep it even after you have stopped using the old app, and especially if the old app was where a particular year’s driving was recorded. The relevant question at the point of an enquiry is not which product you currently pay for; it is whether you can produce the records for the year being asked about. An export you own answers that question regardless of what happened to the company that generated it.
What should I check after the move?
Whether the new setup is actually recording, on a real shift, before you rely on it. This is where most switches quietly fail: the app is installed, the account is signed in, and background tracking is silently off because a permission was never granted or a battery optimiser is putting it to sleep. Drive a shift, then open the log that evening and compare it against what you know you did. Finding the problem on day one costs you nothing; finding it in April costs you a month.
BrewGig imports existing history and exports the whole dataset — trips, expenses with receipts, income, invoices — to Excel on every plan including the free one, so leaving is as easy as arriving and the records are always yours. BrewGig is an independent product and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or partnered with any delivery or rideshare platform; all platform names mentioned here are the trademarks of their respective owners.
- Background location permission set to always, not while-using
- Precise location on, and battery optimisation disabled for the app
- A test shift recorded end to end, and the trip count checked against your memory of the day
- The imported history spot-checked at the changeover week for duplicates and gaps
- The old export stored off the phone, in a folder you will find again