Mileage and tolls are two separate tracking problems, and in NYC both of them can eat into your margins fast if you’re not paying attention.

For mileage, the simplest approach is a tracking app. QuickBooks Online has a built-in mileage tracker that uses GPS to log trips automatically. Other options like MileIQ or Everlance work well too. The key is that your employees or crew leads actually use it every day. A tracking app that nobody opens is useless. Pick one, make it part of the daily routine, and check the logs weekly so gaps don’t pile up. You can reimburse employees at the IRS standard mileage rate, which for 2024 is 67 cents per mile. That rate covers gas, wear and tear, insurance, and depreciation on the vehicle. If your employees drive their own cars between jobs, reimbursing at this rate keeps things clean and deductible for your business without requiring receipts for every fill-up.

Tolls are where NYC cleaning businesses get hit harder than they expect. A crew driving from the Bronx to a client in Manhattan below 60th Street now faces congestion pricing on top of any bridge or tunnel tolls. That’s real money on every single trip. The Whitestone Bridge, Throgs Neck, RFK, George Washington Bridge, and the tunnels all carry tolls that add up when your crews are crossing them multiple times a week. If you’re servicing clients across all five boroughs or into Westchester, these costs can run hundreds of dollars a month per vehicle.

Set up a dedicated business E-ZPass account for each vehicle. This gives you a clean monthly statement showing every toll transaction with dates, times, and crossing locations. Download those statements and match toll charges to specific jobs. If a crew crossed the RFK Bridge on Tuesday morning and your schedule shows they were heading to a client on the Upper East Side, that toll gets allocated to that job. This is the only way to know whether a particular client contract is actually profitable after travel costs.

Don’t lump all tolls and mileage into one general expense line. Break them out by job or at minimum by client. A cleaning business with ten recurring clients might find that two of them barely break even once you factor in the travel costs to reach them. That’s information you need when it’s time to renew contracts or adjust pricing.

For reimbursements, process them on a regular schedule. Weekly or biweekly works best. Employees who wait months to get reimbursed stop tracking carefully because they lose motivation. Prompt reimbursement keeps the data flowing and the records accurate. Record each reimbursement in your books with the employee name, date, miles or toll amount, and the job it relates to.

If you’re not sure how to set up job-level tracking for travel costs in your accounting software, working with Bronx bookkeepers who understand the local geography and the cost structure of running mobile crews across NYC will save you from building a system that looks organized but doesn’t actually tell you anything useful. The goal is knowing what each job truly costs you, and in this city, travel is too big a number to guess at.