How RoadKept works

A step-by-step walk through every part of RoadKept — what each screen does, what each control means, and what happens to your figures when you use it. Written for drivers, not developers. Nothing here is tax advice.

Start free — no card required

The free plan covers everything in this guide except the year-end report and the handful of items marked Pro.

Getting started

RoadKept runs in a browser. There is nothing to install, and the free plan never asks for a card.

Go to roadkept.com/app and sign up with an email address.
Answer three short setup questions. First, what you drive for — rideshare, delivery, taxi and limo, or trucking. Second, your state and your filing status. Third, RoadKept shows you the weekly set-aside figure those answers produce, so you leave setup with a number instead of an empty screen.
If you used the calculator on the front page before signing up, the weekly figure you worked out there carries into your account as your starting point.
You land on Today. RoadKept has three destinations — Today, Log and Taxes — and every feature lives under one of them.

Nothing you answer during setup is locked in. Your state, filing status and the rest of your tax profile can be changed at any time in Settings.

On a keyboard, press g and then d, l or t to move between Today, Log and Taxes.

Logging your miles

Miles are most drivers' largest deduction. The Log screen is where they are recorded, and it asks two things before you type anything: how you want to count, and what stretch of time you are logging.

Open Log and find the Log miles card.
Choose an entry method. Miles means you type the distance yourself. Odometer means you type the reading at the start and the reading at the end, and RoadKept subtracts them.
Choose a period: Day, Week or Month. All six combinations work — you can log a whole week by odometer, or a single day by miles.
Enter the date, then either the distance or the two readings.
Set the trip kind — business, commuting or personal. It starts on business. Only business miles produce a deduction, so this is the field worth getting right.
Fill in whatever else you know: which app you drove for, the purpose, the area you worked, how many stops, where you started from, and the hours you were out. Every one of these is optional.
Save. The entry appears in the records table underneath, and every figure on Today is recalculated.

Hours feed only the earnings-per-hour figure on your dashboard. They never move a tax number.

The vehicle and business pickers appear on this form only once you have added a second vehicle or a second business. Until then there is nothing to choose between, so RoadKept does not ask.

2026 has two federal mileage rates — 72.5 cents through June 30 and 76 cents from July 1. RoadKept values each mile at the rate in force on the date you logged it, so a year that straddles the change is priced correctly without you doing anything.

Tracking a shift with GPS

RoadKept can count a shift's miles from your phone's location while you drive. This is a beta feature and it has one real limit, stated here because relying on it without knowing costs you a deduction.

Open Log. The GPS card is at the top, marked BETA.
Tap Start shift when you go online. RoadKept asks for location permission the first time, and holds the screen awake while the shift runs.
Keep RoadKept open and on screen. The card shows the miles counted so far and the minutes you have been on shift.
Tap End shift when you are done. The button shows the total it is about to save. Check that total before you save it.
The shift is written into your log like any other entry, tagged with the platform you picked and marked as GPS-tracked.

Counting pauses if the screen locks or you switch to another app. This is a foreground tracker: the browser suspends it when RoadKept is not the app in front, and the miles stop adding up until you come back. If your total looks short, it is.

Location is used only while a shift is running. It is not collected at any other time.

Manual entry, odometer entry and bulk entry are exact, and none of them depends on your screen staying on. If GPS undercounts a shift, correct it from the records table.

Catching up on past shifts

Most drivers arrive with weeks or months already driven. You do not have to enter them one at a time.

On Log, open Bulk add past shifts.
Paste your shifts, one per line, each with a date and a distance. A line can cover a day, a week or a month.
RoadKept parses the lines and checks each one against what you have already logged.
It reports back in three groups: entries it added, entries it skipped because you already had them, and entries that conflict with something different on the same date. Nothing is silently overwritten.
Fix any conflicting lines and paste them again, or leave them and edit the existing records instead.

The records table below shows your entries grouped by week, with filters. It displays up to 300 rows at a time, but the totals above it are calculated over every record that matches your filter, not just the rows on screen — and the table says so when it is showing a subset.

Select several rows to edit them together, or use a row's menu to delete it or change its trip kind.

Business, commuting and personal

Every mile in RoadKept is one of three kinds, and the difference decides whether it is worth anything. Getting this right is also what turns your log into a measured business-use percentage rather than a guess.

Classify at the moment you log, using the trip kind field on the Log miles form.
Change your mind later from the records table — a row's menu cycles it through business, commuting and personal.
Set your commute default once, on the Log screen: your home base and the round-trip distance to where you normally start. RoadKept then treats your first leg out and last leg back as commuting rather than business.
Check the split on the Taxes screen. Business miles are the deduction. Commuting miles are reported separately, and so are personal miles.

Only business miles produce a mileage deduction. Commuting — the trip between home and the place you start work — is not deductible, and RoadKept reports it in its own place rather than quietly dropping it.

Repeat last shift, on the dashboard, carries the trip kind forward along with the vehicle and the business, and says on screen that it has.

Odometer readings and reconciliation

Two readings a year per vehicle let RoadKept check your logged miles against the miles the car actually travelled. It is the difference between a list of trips and a year that reconciles.

Open Log, go to the vehicle section, and find Odometer readings.
Add a reading dated at the start of the tax year, and another dated at the end.
Optionally attach a photo of the dashboard. The photo is stored with the reading, so the evidence sits with the figure rather than in your camera roll. Storing photos is a Pro feature.
RoadKept tells you which reading a year is still missing.
Once both are in, the year reconciles: total miles travelled, split into business, commuting, personal, and unaccounted — the miles the car covered that no entry explains.

Unaccounted miles are never shown in red, and there is no button that assigns them to business. They are reported as personal, which is the conservative treatment, and the only way to change that is to log what you actually drove.

RoadKept will not offer to close the gap for you. A tool that makes unexplained miles deductible in one tap is a tool that helps you file something you cannot support.

Logging what you were paid

Deductions only mean something against income. The Taxes screen is where payouts go, and it is what turns the set-aside figure from a rule of thumb into an estimate.

Open Taxes and find the payout form.
Pick a period — day, week or month — then enter the date and the amount.
Choose which business the payout belongs to, if you run more than one.
Save, or use the bulk paste box to enter a run of past payouts at once.
Import a platform's own CSV if you have one. RoadKept reads the file; it never asks for a bank login or a platform password.
Read your income back three ways: by IRS estimated-tax quarter, by month, and as an annualised projection of the whole year.

The IRS estimated-tax quarters are not calendar quarters. The first covers January to March, the second April and May, the third June to August, and the fourth September to December. RoadKept uses the real periods, which is why its quarterly figures may not match a calculator that assumes four equal three-month blocks.

Income is taxable whether or not a platform sends you a 1099. Log what you were paid, not what you expect to be reported.

Expenses, vehicles and businesses

Beyond mileage there is everything else you spend to do the job. RoadKept organises it into a fixed list built around what drivers actually claim, so you are recognising items rather than inventing them.

Open Log and move to the Expenses section.
Search the deduction list, or browse it by category, and type an amount against anything that applies to you.
Read the Tax Coach suggestions above the list. Choosing one filters the list straight to that item.
Add your vehicles in the Vehicles section. For each one, record the business-use percentage, running costs and depreciation.
Choose a method per vehicle: standard mileage or actual expenses. RoadKept asks you to confirm, because this election is fixed for as long as you own that car.
Log fill-ups and repairs in the cost log if you want RoadKept to work out your true cost per mile.
Add a second business in the Businesses section if you have one. Each gets its own Schedule C and its own principal business code.

You can hold up to six vehicles and up to four businesses on one account.

Removing a business folds its expenses into your main one rather than deleting them. Retiring a vehicle keeps its history rather than erasing it.

If a vehicle is on the standard mileage method, RoadKept refuses to book fuel and repairs against it, and names the vehicle that could take them instead. Claiming both the standard rate and the running costs for the same car is double-counting.

Receipts: scanning, and the vault

Photograph a receipt and RoadKept reads it. What it reads is a suggestion, never a booking — you approve every figure before it touches your return.

Open Log, go to Receipts, and take or choose a photo.
RoadKept shrinks the image in your browser and sends it to be read. It comes back with a merchant, an amount, a category and a date.
Check all four against the photo, which is shown back to you, and correct anything wrong.
Approve it. Only then is the expense recorded.
Photographed receipts that have not been given a category wait in the receipt vault. A banner on the Log screen tells you how many are waiting and roughly what they are worth in tax.
Open the vault to clear them one at a time. Keys 1 to 8 pick a category, Enter books the receipt, and the right arrow skips to the next one.
Undo stays available for the whole session, including after the queue empties.

The amount a scan produces is bounded on the server to the same limit the manual entry field enforces. A model reading a photograph is untrusted input, and RoadKept treats it that way.

A photograph is sent as a photograph. RoadKept strips identifying numbers out of the *text* you type, but it cannot do that to an image. If a document you are photographing has a Social Security, account or card number printed on it, cover the number before you take the picture.

Storing receipt images — the Audit Vault — is a Pro feature. If a Pro subscription lapses you keep everything you stored and can still read and delete it; you simply cannot add more.

Free accounts get five scans a month. You can always add the deduction by typing it; scanning only saves the typing.

The dashboard, and your set-aside number

Today is the screen you land on. It is deliberately short at the top and detailed underneath, because most days you want one number and one action.

Read the This week card. It shows what you kept of what you earned, how many days you have logged out of the days that have passed, your best day, and the oldest day you have not logged yet — with a single Log it button beside it.
Open the ledger with the disclosure below it to see everything else.
Today's card shows what the day is worth to you: earnings, car cost, tolls, and the tax that day owes, plus a seven-day strip. A day you have not logged is drawn dashed rather than as a zero, because those are not the same thing.
The hero figure is the tax you are not paying this year because of what you have logged, with a twelve-month sparkline beneath it.
The Money for taxes card gives your figure for this week, headed with the next IRS deadline.
Use the action row — repeat last shift, log a shift, add pay, add a receipt — for the four things you do most.
Read Deductions you have not claimed yet underneath. Items RoadKept cannot price for you say 'worth checking' instead of showing a dollar figure it cannot stand behind.

The set-aside card has three honest states. In your first eight weeks it shows 25% of what you have actually brought in, and says plainly that a handful of weeks cannot describe twelve months. After that it shows either a low-to-high band, drawn from your best and worst eight weeks, or a single estimate with a band around it — whichever your data supports.

Marking a week's set-aside records that you did it. It does not move any money. RoadKept holds no funds and has no access to your bank.

Every figure here is recalculated each time you log something. There is no overnight batch you are waiting on.

The Taxes screen and its checks

Taxes is where income, deductions and your profile become an estimate — and where RoadKept runs a set of checks against your year.

Set your filing status and state at the top if you have not already.
Read the estimate: self-employment tax, federal income tax, and state tax where RoadKept models your state. Where it does not model a state, it says so rather than substituting a guess.
Check 1099 reconciliation. It compares what you logged against what your platforms are likely to report, which is the mismatch that produces an IRS letter. If the figures disagree, RoadKept can draft a dispute letter.
Check the safe-harbour tracker. Paying a set proportion of last year's tax, or of this year's, generally protects you from an underpayment penalty even if the final bill turns out larger. The card tracks where you stand and links to the IRS payment page.
Read the tips deduction card if tipped income applies to you.
Pro accounts also get method compare — standard mileage against actual expenses, per vehicle — and the W-2 side job check, which works out whether raising withholding at a regular job can replace quarterly payments.

The two checks that head off a penalty — 1099 reconciliation and the safe-harbour tracker — are free on every plan. Charging a driver to find out they are about to be fined is the wrong side of the line.

Estimates are educational. They depend on what you have entered and on the assumptions each figure states, and they are not a substitute for a return prepared by a qualified professional.

Year-end reports and exports

At the end of the year the point is to hand somebody a document. RoadKept produces four, each one click, each built from what you have logged rather than from a projection.

Open Taxes and scroll to the year-end report. Check the year selector is on the year you want.
Preparer package (PDF) is the main one — the superset a preparer actually wants. Start here.
Excel workbook gives the same year as a spreadsheet, for tax software or your own working.
Preparer worksheet is a plain-text document: page one is what a preparer reads, pages two and three are the questions they would otherwise have to email you.
Summary only (PDF) is the short version.
Read the Schedule C line-by-line table on the same screen, and the evidence behind these figures block beneath it — shift counts, payout counts, vehicles, and whether your odometer readings substantiate the year.

The year-end report and all four exports are Pro.

Two exports are free on every plan, from Account & Plan: your complete data as JSON, covering every year, and your mileage log as CSV for the selected year.

The worksheet checks itself before it downloads and refuses to produce a file that fails its own rules. Projections are excluded from all four documents — they report what you logged.

Sharing with your tax professional

Rather than emailing a spreadsheet, you can give a preparer read-only access to your account for as long as you choose. Pro feature.

Open Account & Plan, then Share with your tax pro.
Enter their email address and send the invitation.
Choose which tax years they can see, and for how long. Twelve months is the default.
They accept from the link and see your records. They cannot change anything.
If they spot a problem, they raise it as an open question. You answer it by correcting your own record, so your account stays the single version of your year.
Revoke access at any time. The access history shows you when they looked.

You can have up to three active grants at once.

Access is read-only in the database, not merely in the interface. There is no path through which an invited preparer can write to your records.

Your data, your account, and leaving

Everything you log is saved on your own device first and then backed up to your account. That order is deliberate: a dropped connection must never cost you an entry.

Log normally. Entries save locally the moment you press save, whether or not you have signal.
When you are back online, RoadKept backs them up to your account and merges them with anything you logged on another device.
Watch the banner if one appears. It will tell you which of four things is true: saved on this device only, backup is not working, backup is paused for maintenance, or a specific number of entries could not be backed up.
Manage everything else in Settings, which has eight panes: your tax profile, vehicles, businesses, platforms, tracking, reminders, plan and billing, and your data.
Export whenever you like from Account & Plan — JSON for everything, CSV for a year's mileage log.
To leave, use Delete my account & data. Export first.

Deleting gives you a 30-day grace period. Your account is scheduled for erasure, nothing is destroyed yet, and a banner on every screen counts down with a one-tap Keep my account button. Signing back in does not quietly cancel the deletion — only you can, and it takes one tap.

If you sign out or reset local data while entries have not reached your account yet, RoadKept warns you and tells you how many. It does not let that happen quietly.

If the same record is edited on two devices, the most recent one to reach the account wins. This is a known limit, stated rather than hidden.

In Settings → Reminders you can see every category of email RoadKept sends, and switch each one off. There are no streaks, no weekly summaries and no re-engagement mail.

What is free, and what is Pro

Almost everything in this guide is free. The free plan is not a trial, it does not expire, and it does not ask for a card.

Free includes unlimited mileage logging by any method, unlimited income logging, the whole expense list, your vehicles and businesses, the dashboard, the set-aside figure, reconciliation, 1099 reconciliation, the safe-harbour tracker, and both data exports.
Free also includes ten Tax Copilot questions and five receipt scans a month, resetting on the 1st.
Pro is $7 a month or $69 a year, and starts with a 14-day free trial that needs a card.
Pro adds the year-end Schedule C report and its four exports; the Audit Vault for receipt and odometer photos; unlimited Copilot questions and receipt scans; quarterly deadline alerts that carry your own amounts; method compare and the W-2 side job check; and read-only sharing with your tax professional.
Cancel from Account & Plan before your next renewal. You keep access to the end of the period you have paid for.

There is no history limit on the free plan. A free account keeps every year you have ever logged, and logging across several platforms is part of the product on both plans.

The price you join at is the price you keep, for as long as your subscription stays active without a lapse. If prices rise, that applies to new subscribers.

Only a confirmed payment unlocks Pro. Nothing running in your browser can grant it.

What RoadKept does not do

The honest list, because knowing where a tool stops is part of knowing how to use it.

It does not file your return, and it does not represent you. It organises your year into figures you, your tax software or your preparer can work from.
It does not give personal tax advice. RoadKept was built by a tax professional with 15+ years of experience and gives general educational estimates. Review anything material with a qualified professional.
It does not hold your money. The set-aside figure is a number to act on, not an account.
It does not track you in the background. GPS counts a shift only while a shift is running and RoadKept is open, and location is not collected at any other time.
It does not detect drives by itself, and it does not send push notifications. What it sends is email, and you control every category of it.
It does not model every state, and it says which. Where a state is not modelled, RoadKept withholds a figure rather than estimating one.
It does not score you. There is no percentage and no streak, just a finite list of named open items you can act on. A score is something a driver could close by moving miles into the business column, and that is the one nudge RoadKept will not build.

RoadKept is a young product and is not free of defects. If something looks wrong, Get help in Account & Plan reaches a person.

Questions drivers ask

Do I have to log every single trip separately?

No. You can log a day, a week or a month at a time, by distance or by odometer reading, and paste a run of past shifts in one go. What the IRS asks for is a record made at or near the time, showing the date, the mileage and the business purpose — Pub 463 sets out the substantiation rules and the exceptions. A weekly entry backed by odometer readings is a common way drivers meet that; whether it is adequate for your circumstances is worth confirming with a preparer.

What if I have not logged anything for weeks?

Use the bulk entry box on the Log screen to paste past shifts, and add your odometer readings so the year reconciles. RoadKept checks each pasted line against what you already have and reports what it added, what it skipped as a duplicate, and what conflicts with an existing record — it never silently overwrites. Reconstructing a period from memory is weaker evidence than a contemporaneous record, so log what you can support.

Does RoadKept track my location in the background?

No. GPS shift tracking is a beta feature that counts miles only while a shift is running and RoadKept is open on your screen, and counting pauses if the screen locks or you switch apps. Location is not collected at any other time. Manual, odometer and bulk entry involve no location at all, and they are exact.

Can I use it on my phone and my laptop?

Yes. Entries save on the device you made them on and are then backed up to your account, so both devices converge on the same records. If the same record is edited on two devices, the most recent edit to reach your account is the one that is kept.

What happens to my records if I cancel Pro?

You keep them. Cancelling stops future renewal charges and you keep Pro access to the end of the period you have paid for, after which the account continues on the free plan with every year you have logged still there. Receipt and odometer photos you already stored stay readable and deletable; what stops is adding new ones, along with the year-end report and the other Pro items. Both data exports stay free.

Do I need Pro to do my taxes?

No. The free plan tracks mileage, income and deductions, produces the set-aside estimate, and exports your complete data as JSON and your mileage log as CSV. Pro adds the year-end Schedule C report and its four preparer-ready exports, which save assembling those figures yourself. Neither plan files a return or replaces a preparer.

Can my accountant see my records?

Yes, with Pro. You invite them by email, choose which tax years they can see and for how long, and revoke it whenever you like. Their access is read-only in the database rather than only in the interface, so they cannot alter your records — if they find a problem they raise it as a question and you correct it yourself.