Hello, I need to calculate my mileage as a Amazon Flex driver but I haven't kept any record. What should I do in order to calculate my driven mileage for the Schedule C?

[Opus 17 · Accepted solution]

If audited, you bear the burden of proving your expenses.  So in strictest terms, if you don't have records of your mileage, you can't deduct anything.  Your records must be contemporaneous—made close enough in time to the actual trips that you can rely on your memory to be accurate.  A daily diary is best. There are smartphone apps for tracking milage, and some more expenses GPS units will remember your trips for you.

Beyond that, what answer do you think anyone can give?  Maybe amazon has a record of your stops, that you could put in google maps to put together an estimate. Maybe you guess that your average is so many miles per day.  If you have records of oil changes and other car maintenance, maybe you can figure out the average miles per month you drove before becoming an Amazon driver, and the average number of miles per month after, and the increase is probably your work miles.

But if you don't have records, or your records are obviously cobbled together after the fact from memory, estimates and guesses, you lose the deduction if audited.  

Good luck.

[sheridan2222]

Thank you so much for your answer.

[johnhoy]

I know on the flex app you can go to your earnings tab and see all the dates you worked and how much that trip paid. A good starting point would be to go through that and write down all the dates you worked. You may not be able to prove all your mileage, but at the very least you could put down the mileage from your house to the distribution center, since that is driven every time you do a route for them. 

[Anonymous]

@johnboy 

without contemporaneous records, if audited, the taxpayer is at the mercy of the IRS agent.  the agent could properly disallowed the entire deduction because the required records were not kept.