I just wanted to pass on two little tricks that Brett discovered when using Basecamp for project management.

1. Keeping Track of Mileage

The first technique involves using the program to keep track of driving mileage. This is really useful because you can take a big deduction from your taxes at the year end for the miles you have driven for the company (44.5 cents per mile). Just set up a separate project (we call ours ‘Mileage’), click on the Time tab, and record the miles driven in the ‘hours’ input. This works great because you can assign who did the driving and include a brief description of the purpose. Then, you can easily create reports for any specified range of time, and you can track the mileage of the company as a whole or of individual members.

2. Keeping Track of Expenses

The second technique is similar, but even more useful. We’ve always had difficulty keeping on top of expenses (a problem that many companies run in to). With business members making purchases in different cities and states, it became notoriously difficult for me to know which expenses were made for what. It turns out that there is an easy way to keep track of these expenses using the Basecamp system.

Just create another project called ‘Expenses,’ and you can record the expenses in the Time tab. Thankfully, the system allows you to input negative numbers. Just log negative numbers for expenses and positive numbers for deposits. Just like before, you can create quick reports to track expenses over a certain period of time, either for the entire company or for an individual member. Include a brief description so that your finance guy can correctly categorize the expenses. The beauty of this approach is its simplicity and speed. Plus, since it is done within Basecamp, it is integrated with project management.

Incidentally, there are some other great uses for an ‘Expenses’ project in Basecamp. I post the bank file for the company so that everyone can access the financial information whenever they need it. It’s also a great place to attach any receipts you want to keep track of.

Happy Basecamping!