Doula Mileage: The Tax Deduction You're Probably Losing in Your Car
Quick question: how many business miles did you drive last year?
If you're like most doulas, the honest answer is "a lot, and I can prove almost none of it." Your work happens everywhere except an office. A prenatal visit across town. A birth at the hospital at 2 a.m., and the drive home at noon. Two postpartum visits in opposite directions, a supply stop in between. Week after week, those miles are real business expenses - and for a self-employed doula, business mileage is generally deductible (this is record-keeping, not tax advice; your tax preparer makes the final call for your situation).
The deduction isn't usually lost because doulas don't drive. It's lost because of how the proof has to look. A tax-ready mileage log needs, for each trip: the date, the business purpose - which client, which destination - and the miles. Reconstructing that in March from a calendar and a memory of "I think she lived about twenty minutes away?" produces either a guess an examiner won't love, or a smaller, sadder number than the truth - the trips you can't reconstruct simply don't get claimed. The classic glove-box notebook dies by week three. A separate mileage app helps only if you remember to start and stop it at every client's door, which - in the middle of being called to a birth - you will not.
Here's the thing nobody points out: your visits already know where they happened. The client record has her home address. The birth has its planned hospital. Your day already has a shape. The miles were never missing information - they were just never connected to the record you already keep.
That's how DoulaPilot does mileage. Your practice has a base address. Each in-person visit carries its location - the client's home, the planned hospital, or another place you search for - while an online visit honestly logs zero. The tool computes the round trip from your base. And on the days that really add up - prenatal visit, then a postpartum across town, then home - it builds the day's actual chain of stops: base, to each visit in time order, back to base, which you can confirm, adjust, or reorder before it counts. A closed labor episode contributes its hospital trip to that day like it should. Personal detours never enter the chain; this is the direct business route, nothing padded.
At year-end, the log is already a log: date, client, destination, miles, and a period total, exportable as a file you can hand to your tax preparer instead of a shoebox and an apology.
The miles are leaving your driveway whether you log them or not. The only question is whether they show up in April.
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