Hurdlr: a Comprehensive Overview

Last updated: September 15, 2023

A bit of a Hurdlr history

Hurdlr, the company behind the well-known automatic business expense & mileage tracker, was co-founded by Raj Bhaskar and Anup Desai. Raj Bhaskar has a background in creating solutions for real estate and financial management, which likely influenced the development of Hurdlr’s feature set geared towards automating and streamlining accounting tasks.

So what is Hurdlr for?

The company aims to simplify financial and tax management for freelancers, independent contractors, small business owners and even enterprises. The latter can use Hurdlr as a value-added part of their service to help customers, members or contractors manage business finances and grow their profit easier. The solutions, in general, have been designed to integrate with bank accounts, credit cards, and popular platforms like Uber, Airbnb, and Lyft, making it easier for users who engage in gig work or run small businesses to track their income, expenses, and tax obligations automatically.

Hurdlr has gone through several updates to refine its features and user experience over the years, so let’s see what it has to offer users at its present incarnation, especially in terms of IRS-proof mileage tracking, which is a crucial ingredient of the overall picture encompassing business expanse tracking and tax estimation.

Pros and Cons for using Hurdlr

In general, its user-friendly interface, automation capabilities, and real-time tax estimates are particularly beneficial for freelancers and small business owners who may not have the time or expertise to manage their finances manually. So let’s start with the pros in detail:

Automatic Tracking:
Hurdlr excels in automating the tracking of expenses and mileage, removing the need for manual entries for each expense. This is a huge time-saver and minimizes the risk of errors or omissions.

Auto-tagging Repeat Drives
If you often find yourself driving the same routes for business purposes, Hurdlr offers an auto-tagging feature. This function remembers your frequent trips and automatically categorizes them for you, making the logging process even more straightforward.

Easily separate business and personal trips
Hurdlr provides a simple and quick method for categorizing your trips as either business or personal. This feature often involves using arrows or swipes in the app, making it effortless to separate business miles from personal miles, which is essential for tax purposes.

Nice try, but how about MileageWises’s uber convenient, AI-powerd auto-classification feature that makes sure your business trips and personal trips never get mixed up again?

Real-time Tax Estimates:
Hurdlr provides a real-time view of your tax obligations based on your income and expenses, which is incredibly useful for planning and budgeting.

Integration:
The app can integrate seamlessly with other platforms you might use for your business like Uber, Lyft, or Airbnb, PayPal, Stripe thus capturing your financial data, including mileage information, from multiple sources in one place.

User-Friendly Interface:
The user interface is clean and intuitive, making it easy even for users who aren’t tech-savvy.

Export and Reporting:
The app allows for easy export of your financial data, which is useful for sharing information with your accountant or for your personal records.

Let’s take a look at the Cons now:

Limited Customization:
While Hurdlr covers the basics well, it does not offer as much customization as some other accounting or mileage tracker software, which might be a limitation for businesses with more complex needs.

Subscription Model:
The free version is quite limited in its offerings, and the premium version, starting at $10/mo., might be considered a bit pricey for small business owners or freelancers who are just starting out. Limitations in the free version include no access to the fully automatic mileage tracker feature (you need to manually start and stop tracking for each trip).

Limited assistance in IRS-compliance:
While the Hurdlr website does describe at length the importance of keeping proper logs to prepare for an IRS audit, the mileage tracker solution doesn’t necessarily offer any tangible help in this regard, sort of leaving it up to the user to smarten up in the subject matter and then decide how seriously they’ll take the relevant requirements.

But should we just accept that that’s the best a mileage tracker app can do for the user? What about trip-gaps? What about the need for retrospective logs or the ability to import Google Timeline logs to cover trips that never got properly taken care of? No mention of these in the Hurdlr book.

MileageWise, however, offers users a great deal of help in this regard, going as far as checking and correcting 70 possible contradictions in their records before letting the user print out the final log. It is literally like having an IRS-auditor in the user’s pocket.

Moreover, AdWise, the AI-powered feature in MileageWise suggests plausible trips based on your driving patterns, helping to complete any gaps in your mileage log for a result that’s compliant with IRS requirements.

Wrapping it up

While, ultimately, Hurdlr is a 2-in-1 automatic business expense & mileage tracker, its mileage tracker solution falls short of explicitly helping its customers achieve IRS-proof logs, which not only serve as the backbone of tax deduction for business mileage but are also an integral part of the bigger picture. If your mileage log deduction stands on weak legs, your overall business expanse tracking and, consequently, your overall tax deduction oppotunity will also suffer. As a verdict, Hurdlr could definitely do with a feature like MileageWise’s above mentioned AdWise.

Plus, if you make the move to MileageWise, you don’t need to worry about losing the opportunity of doing expense tracking and mileage tracking in one go. You can already avail of the vehicle expense tracker in the MileageWise web dashboard and the great news is that the same feature will also be available in the mobile app soon!

Download MileageWise’s automatic mileage tracker app from Google Play or the App Store & try it for free for 14 days. No credit card required!

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