3.8. Working with trips

3.8.1. About trips

Trips help you record the distance and time you travel with a vehicle. If you need to track taxi fares or similar travel expenses, please see the expenses section for more details. Here's what you can record with a trip:

  • Project: The project where you want to record the trip. The project is mandatory as you can only record trips on projects.

  • Date: The date when the trip was made.

  • Distance: The total distance of the trip. Fanurio tracks distances in miles (mi) and kilometers (km) but we can introduce other distance units if necessary. The default distance unit is defined under Business » My Business Details+Projects+Trips.

  • Description: A small description of the trip.

  • Start Time [optional]: The time when the trip started.

  • End Time [optional]: The time when the trip ended.

  • Start Location [optional]: The location where the trip started.

  • End Location [optional]: The location where the trip ended.

  • Tags [optional]: A list of zero or more tags separated by commas. Tags can help you organize trips and record additional information like the vehicle name.

If a project is billable, trips have a few more fields. Trips from non-billable projects don't show these fields:

  • Billable: When checked, it indicates that the distance recorded by the trip is billed at the specified rate (explained below). Billable projects can have both billable and non-billable trips.

  • Rate: Indicates how much is charged for each unit (mile or kilometer). Trip rates can either be defined in the New Trip window by using the New link button or under Business » My Business Details+Projects+Trips.

There are several ways you can record a trip:

  1. Go to Business » New Trip.

  2. Go to the Trips view and use the New button.

    When you use this method and the date filter is set to a specific date, trips are added by default to that date. This method is very useful if you need to enter trips for previous dates as it saves you from specifying the date for each trip.

  3. Open a project and go to the Trips section. Then click the New button.

3.8.2. Configuring optional fields

Because not all trip fields are relevant to all users, you can hide optional fields that you don't use. Optional trip fields are fields that can be hidden in the trip windows (New Trip or Edit Trip). Here's how you can configure them:

  1. Create a new trip (New Trip) or edit an existing one (Edit Trip).

  2. Click the Configure button from the bottom-left corner.

  3. Check the fields that you want to be visible and uncheck the ones that you want to hide.

  4. Click Done. Fanurio will update the trip window to show only selected fields.

For instance, two of the optional fields are Start Time and End Time. These fields only makes sense if you need to know how long your trips were. If so, you may also want to make the Duration column visible in the trips table.

3.8.3. Billing trips (mileage)

When you're billing a trip, you are actually billing its distance at a specified rate.

Trip rates are a key element when it comes to billing trips because you can't specify a price for each trip, instead you must define one or more rates that are shared by all billable trips. Trip rates can be defined in the New Trip window by using the New link button or under Business » My Business Details+Projects+Trips. You can always define new rates and disable the ones that you'll no longer use.

Let's consider the following example to understand how trips are billed. The HM Revenue & Customs mileage rates are used in the UK and they are different for cars, motorcycles and bicycles. For our example, we'll only use the car and bicycle mileage rates:

  • Car: 0.45 GBP / mile

  • Bicycle: 0.20 GBP / mile

Let's suppose you recorded the following trips in May last year:

  1. May 01: 20 mi (Car)

  2. May 02: 30 mi (Car)

  3. May 03: 50 mi (Car)

  4. May 04: 4 mi (Bicycle)

  5. May 05: 6 mi (Bicycle)

This means you travelled 100 miles by car and 10 miles by bicycle. When invoicing these trips, Fanurio will group them by rate under two different mileage items: Car and Bicycle. Each mileage item will have the same name and price as the rate and the quantity set to the total distance recorded on trips billed with that rate. In other words, your invoice will show like this:

Table 3.7. Sample mileage invoice

Item Quantity UM Price Total
Bicycle 10 mi 0.20 GBP 2 GBP
Car 100 mi 0.45 GBP 45 GBP
Total       47 GBP

For each mileage item you can show individual trips if you need to but this is optional.

3.8.4. Using tags to organize trips

When creating or editing a trip, you can associate one or more tags with it in the Tags field. They have to be separated by commas (eg: tag1,tag2,tag3). If you need to tag multiple trips, go to the Trips view and select them. Then click the Tags button at the bottom of the table.

Once you have one or more trips with tags, you can then filter them in the Trips view. Just click the small arrow icon from the search field to tell it that you want to search by tags. Then type the name of the tag that you want to search for.

3.8.5. Searching and filtering trips

To learn more about the trips you record in Fanurio, go to the Trips view and use the filters above the trips table. The table will display only those trips that match the selected filters. Trips can be filtered by:

  • client status (any, active, not active),

  • project status (any, finished, not finished),

  • invoiced status (any, invoiced, not invoiced),

  • billing status (any, billable, not billable) and

  • date.

Once you set these filters, the table footer will display the total distance of all visible trips. For instance, you could use these filters to see how much you've travelled on a day, week or month.

The table can also be filtered using a search field that can search by:

  • description,

  • tags,

  • rate,

  • client;project and

  • invoice.

The client;project option allows you to filter trips by client, or project name.

If you have a client called Aristotle with a project called Rhetoric, just type Aristotle;Rhetoric and it will display this exact project. If you type Aristotle it will display all trips for this client. The semicolon is very important as it helps Fanurio distinguish between fields.

3.8.6. Exporting trips

Fanurio can export trips to CSV and Excel. To export them, you can either:

  • Go to File » Export » Export Trips to export all the trips you recorded in Fanurio or

  • Go to the Trips view and click the Export Table button to export only the trips visible in the trips table.

3.8.7. Creating trips reports

The previous section explains how you can filter or search the list of trip so you can get a quick insight about how you much you travelled. However, if you need to use this information outside Fanurio you can either export the list of trips as a CSV or Excel file or create a trips report. Trips reports are more flexible because they allow you to use a template to format data.

Go to Reports » Trips Report to create a report for your trips. Just like in the Trips view, you can use several filters to specify which trips should be included in the report:

  • Projects specifies the projects included in the report.

  • Date specifies the date interval when time was recorded.

  • Billing specifies whether the report should include billable or non-billable trips.

  • Invoiced specifies whether the report should include invoiced or not invoiced trips.

Fanurio comes with one default template:

  • Project Trips shows the distance travelled for the selected projects in the specified date interval.

If you need to create your own templates, please see this section to learn what placeholders you can use.