Recording a Drive in Backbuild Miles
Backbuild Miles records your driving whether or not you are looking at it. The live drive screen is what you open when you do want to look: a moving map with your vehicle on it, your speed against the posted limit, the miles and the money adding up as you go, and the controls you actually need with a vehicle around you. This page teaches you how to open it, how to read every number on it, what each control does, and what happens to the drive when you stop. After this page you will be able to drive a full working day with Backbuild Miles and know, at the end of it, exactly what was recorded and why.
What This Screen Is For
After this section you will know when to open the live drive screen and when to leave it closed.
Backbuild Miles captures your driving in the background. You do not have to open anything for a drive to be recorded, and you do not have to remember to press a button at the start of every journey. That background capture is the normal way the app works, and it is covered in Clearing Your Trip Inbox.
The live drive screen is the deliberate, foreground version of the same thing. You open it when you want to watch the drive happen: to see your speed against the limit, to see the miles and the deduction value climb, to mark a pickup or a dropoff at the moment it happens rather than reconstructing it that evening, or to find a petrol station without leaving the app. It also starts recording immediately, which matters when you are parked. Automatic detection only wakes up once you are moving at a reasonable speed, so a drive that begins on a driveway has a short gap at the front. Opening this screen closes that gap.
There is a cost, and it is worth stating plainly because it is the most common question drivers ask about any app like this: this screen holds your display awake for as long as it is open, and it asks the phone for a fresh position every second. Both are deliberate. A display that sleeps freezes the readouts, and a once-every-thirty-seconds position is useless underneath a live speed dial. Both also cost battery. On a long shift, open this screen when you want it and go back to the dashboard when you do not: capture keeps running either way, so nothing is lost by closing it.
Opening the Screen
After this section you will be able to start a drive from anywhere in the app.
Tap the round + button in the lower right of any tab, then choose Start Trip. The live drive screen opens and recording begins from your last known position. If a drive is already in progress, the screen simply joins it: nothing restarts and nothing is lost.
You will need to have granted location access. If the map sits on Waiting for GPS and never resolves, the grant is the first thing to check; Getting Around Backbuild Miles covers the tracking-health banner that tells you which permission is missing.
Reading the Live Display
After this section you will be able to read every number on the screen and know how far to trust it.
Miles, Time and Value
Miles is the distance recorded on this drive so far, to one decimal place. Time is how long the drive has been running. Value is what those miles are worth at the current standard mileage rate, in dollars.
The value is a live estimate of the deduction, not a promise of one. It uses the published standard rate for today's date, and the rate can change part way through a year, so Backbuild Miles reads the correct one for the day you are driving rather than assuming. If no published rate covers the date, the value shows a dash instead of a confident zero. Whether the drive is deductible at all depends on its classification, which you set afterwards: see Working Your Trips List.
The Speed Dial
The dial at the bottom of the map shows your current speed in miles per hour, derived from the phone's positioning. The needle sweeps to 100 and pins there above that. The dial paints itself on a dark disc rather than taking the map's colours, so the number stays readable over a pale motorway or a dark park.
Treat the dial as a driving aid, not an instrument. Positioning-derived speed is close but it is not a calibrated speedometer, it degrades when the sky is obstructed, and it is not evidence. If you are ever disputing a citation, the figure on this dial is not a substitute for a calibration record, and your vehicle's own speedometer and the posted signage remain authoritative.
The Speed-Limit Sign
When map data has a posted limit for the road you are on, a sign appears in the lower right of the map, and the dial turns red when you are over it.
The sign is often absent, and that is not a fault. Speed limits come from open map data, whose coverage is good on major roads and patchy on residential streets, service roads and anything recently built. Backbuild Miles will never invent a limit it does not have: no sign means no data, not "no limit". The posted signage on the road is always the authority.
The Altimeter
Beneath the miles readout, Backbuild Miles shows your altitude in feet, with the sensor it came from underneath. On a phone with a barometer it reads barometer; otherwise it reads GPS, and it shows nothing at all until a real reading arrives.
The two are not interchangeable and Backbuild Miles deliberately does not average them. A barometer resolves small changes in height very well, but its absolute reading depends on the day's sea-level pressure, which the phone does not know, so weather can shift it by tens of feet. Positioning-derived altitude does not drift with the weather but is markedly less precise than the same system's horizontal accuracy. Showing you which one you are looking at is more useful than blending them into a single figure that is wrong in a way you cannot see.
The Heading Arrow
The blue arrow is your vehicle. It sits on your actual position on the map and it points the way you are facing.
Which sensor supplies "the way you are facing" changes with your speed, and this is deliberate. While you are moving, the arrow uses your course over the ground, computed from your successive positions, which is the direction you are genuinely travelling. When you are stopped, there is no motion to compute a course from, so the arrow uses the phone's compass instead. That is why turning a parked car around does move the arrow: the compass, not the positioning, is answering.
Steering the Map
After this section you will be able to change what the map is showing without losing your place.
Four round buttons sit on the right edge of the map, top to bottom.
- Zoom in and zoom out step the map one level at a time. They exist as buttons as well as gestures because a pinch needs two hands and a driver has one.
- The 3D toggle tips the map into perspective, so the road ahead runs away from you instead of lying flat. Tipping the map pushes the horizon back and shrinks everything near the vehicle, so Backbuild Miles gains a zoom level going in and gives it back coming out: toggle it twice and you land exactly where you started.
- The north and heading toggle switches between a map that is always north-up, with the arrow rotating on it, and a map that rotates so that the direction you are driving is always up the screen. Its label tells you what a tap will do next, so you never have to guess which mode you are in.
You can also drag the map with one finger to look somewhere else, and pinch to zoom smoothly. Dragging turns off automatic following, because a map that snapped back to your vehicle on the next position update would fight you every second. Your vehicle arrow stays on your real position while you do this, so panning away shows you the arrow moving off toward the edge of the screen rather than sitting in the middle pretending you are somewhere you are not.
Once you have panned, a Recentre button appears in the lower left. Tap it to put the vehicle back in the middle and turn following on again. Following also re-arms by itself on the next drive, so you never inherit a panned-away map from yesterday.
Marking a Pickup or a Dropoff
After this section you will be able to record where a stop happened, at the moment it happens.
Picked Up and Dropped Off record a labelled point at your current position without interrupting the recording. Tap one and a short line confirms it, then the screen keeps a running count of how many of each you have marked on this drive.
The reason to do this at the kerb is that the kerb is the only place the information exists. Later that evening, a list of coordinates cannot tell you which stop was a collection and which was a delivery; you can. The marks travel with the drive when it is saved, so the trip you review afterwards already knows where its stops were and what they were.
Be clear about what this is: a mark on your own mileage record, useful for reconstructing a working day and for writing an accurate business purpose. It is not a signed manifest and it is not a billing document. If your work requires billing-grade proof of a passenger collection, you need the system that issues the invoice to hold that record, not this one.
If no position has arrived yet, Backbuild Miles tells you so and does not record a mark at a place it cannot vouch for.
Keeping a Dashcam Clip
If you have turned the dashcam on, a camera button appears alongside the two marking buttons. Tap it and Backbuild Miles flags the footage around this moment to be kept: a window before the press and a window after it, both of which you set in the dashcam settings. The confirmation tells you exactly which windows it is keeping.
The clip cannot exist the instant you press, because the "after" window has not been recorded yet. Backbuild Miles says so rather than claiming the clip is already saved, and it tells you if it could not queue the request at all. If the button is not there, the dashcam is off; turn it on in settings first.
Before you record in a vehicle carrying other people, check what your jurisdiction requires. Rules on recording, and particularly on recording audio, vary from place to place, and several places require the consent of everyone present. This is a legal question about where you drive rather than a setting in the app, and it is worth answering before you need the footage rather than after.
Food, Fuel and Repairs Along the Way
After this section you will be able to find somewhere to stop and hand off to your navigation app without losing the drive.
The tabs along the bottom switch the screen between the map and three searches around your current position: Food, Fuel and Car, the last being vehicle repair. Each returns real places ordered by how far away they are, with the distance, the driving time and, where it is known, the street address.
Tap a row to expand it and see its coordinates. Tap the round play button on the row, or Drive there in the expanded row, and Backbuild Miles hands the destination to whichever map or navigation app you have set as your default, with the place already pinned and named.
Handing off does not end your drive. Recording is done by the part of Backbuild Miles that runs regardless of what is on screen, so switching to a navigation app leaves the mileage log running. What pauses is only what you can see: the map, the dial and the readouts on this screen. Come back to Backbuild Miles and they are live again, with the miles you covered in the meantime already counted.
A search can fail. It depends on an external map-data service, and when that service is slow or unavailable the panel says Could not load nearby places. Tap to retry. rather than spinning indefinitely or showing you an empty list as though there were genuinely nothing around. Tapping usually works, because the failures are intermittent rather than permanent.
Ending the Drive
After this section you will know the three things Backbuild Miles can tell you at the end of a drive, and what each one means for your records.
The round red button with a square in it ends the drive immediately. You do not have to use it: if you simply park and walk away, Backbuild Miles notices that you have stopped and closes the drive on its own after a few minutes. The button is for when you want it closed now.
Either way you get one of three answers, and they mean different things.
- Trip logged. The drive was kept. It is saved on the phone and syncing to your unclassified list for review. If you are signed out it is still saved, and it uploads when you sign in.
- Trip discarded. The drive was too short to keep, so nothing was saved and it will not appear in your trips. A few seconds of movement in a car park is not a journey, and recording it as one would put noise into a log you may have to defend.
- Trip finished. The drive ended but Backbuild Miles could not confirm what became of it. This is rare. Check your trips list rather than assuming either way.
Each answer carries the distance and the value, and both buttons underneath take you onward: Review trips to classify what you have just driven, or Back to dashboard.
Common Questions
Does this drain my battery?
The live drive screen is the most power-hungry part of Backbuild Miles, because it holds the display awake and asks for a position every second. Ordinary background capture does neither: it uses a much slower, lower-power positioning mode and needs no screen at all. If battery matters more than watching the drive, close this screen and let the app record in the background. Nothing is lost by doing so.
Why did my speed and heading stop updating?
The readouts on this screen depend on a live position feed, and that feed can be interrupted by things outside the app: a tunnel, a multi-storey car park, a street with tall buildings on both sides. When the position stops arriving the readouts hold their last value rather than inventing a new one. They resume when the signal does. Distance is reconciled from the positions that were actually recorded, so an interruption does not silently inflate your mileage.
Why is there no speed limit shown?
Because there is no posted limit in the map data for that stretch of road. Coverage is strongest on major roads and weakest on residential streets and new developments. Backbuild Miles shows the sign only when it has real data.
Do I have to remember to start and stop it?
No. Backbuild Miles detects drives on its own and closes them when you park. Opening this screen starts recording immediately, which is useful when you are setting off from a standstill, and the stop button closes a drive on demand. If you forget to do either, the drive is still captured.
Why was my short trip not saved?
Because it did not meet the threshold for a real journey. If you believe a drive should have been kept and it was not, you can enter it by hand: see Working Your Trips List.
Can I use the speed reading to dispute a ticket?
It is not built for that. The dial is a driving aid derived from the phone's positioning, not a calibrated instrument, and a screenshot of it is not evidence. Treat it as guidance while you drive.
What happens if I switch to my navigation app mid-drive?
The drive keeps recording. Only the on-screen map and readouts pause, and they resume when you return.
Will this record my location when I am not working?
This screen records only while a drive is in progress, and every recorded drive lands in your unclassified list where you decide whether it was business or personal. Classification is yours to set, and personal drives stay personal.
Where to Go Next
- Working Your Trips List: give every drive a vehicle, a classification and a business purpose.
- Clearing Your Trip Inbox: how the drives captured in the background reach you.
- Your Vehicles: register the vehicle a drive belongs to and record what it costs to run.
- Reports and Exports: turn a year of driving into a deduction and a mileage log.
- Getting Around Backbuild Miles: the menu, the pickers and the tabs.