I have been mystery shopping for about a year and I tend to be in the $15-$20 per hour on average after factoring in drive time and fuel. Some shops are higher and some are lower. What do you use to track your shops with so many shops offered across so many different websites and companies?

yes, I have a spreadsheet for shop date, name and location, company, mileage, fee, reimbursement amount, amount over reimbursement.

@Joanna,

Would you be willing to share your spreadsheet to use as a template? Thank you.

I put everything on onedrive, a folder for 1099, inside have each company as a sub-folder, and for each sub folder I have a spreadsheet for some simply logging such as date, shop name, address, fee, mileage. also a pdf file of the supportive documents for each job that could be useful in the future.

To track your mileage, look up an app called MileIQ in the app store for tax purposes for the 1099 write off expense part of things. As far as getting audited, I invest with Fidelity and have had my own business for several years and haven't ever even come close mainly because I don't write everything off probably. The 1099 should show you your earnings by EOY then it's the the tax liability which honestly doesn't do much for an actual tax break in my past experiences.

Thanks for sharing this information regarding MileIQ. I definitely will look into it.

AZCross @ Mar 21, 2024, 3:42:42 PM

To track your mileage, look up an app called MileIQ in the app store for tax purposes for the 1099 write off expense part of things. As far as getting audited, I invest with Fidelity and have had my own business for several years and haven't ever even come close mainly because I don't write everything off probably. The 1099 should show you your earnings by EOY then it's the the tax liability which honestly doesn't do much for an actual tax break in my past experiences.