After entering your settlements or invoice amounts, it's time to enter your additional expenses. The Monthly Expense section is only for your business expenses that do not come off of your settlement. If a deduction is taken out of your gross revenue on your settlement, you'll enter that expense when entering your settlement. If you also enter it in the Monthly Expense section then that amount will be doubled on your reports, and we don't want that.

To begin entering your monthly expenses, click on 'Expenses' on the left-hand side of the page. This will take you to the Monthly Expense section. To begin a new month, select the month you are working on at the top of the page under 'Start a new month'. Months that are already saved will be grayed out as well as months that haven't arrived yet in the year. For example, if it is March, you won't be able to select April and on.

The next screen is where you will enter your Miles, Per Diem, and Personal Vehicle Miles. For your mileage, you can either enter your beginning and ending odometer readings and it will calculate your total mileage. Or, you can click in the total miles box and enter your monthly total.

If you enter odometer readings, the program will bring over the ending odometer reading of the previous month into the beginning odometer reading of the next month. For example, if your ending odometer reading for January was 150,000 miles, when you start your February expenses you will see 150,000 pre-filled for your beginning odometer reading and you just have to enter the ending reading.

Under 'How many nights were you away?' you will enter the total nights you were on the road for ProfitGauges to track your Per Diem. To get the monthly total, add up your full days and partial days. Full days are counted as 1 and partial days are counted as .75. So if you have two partial days, they would add up to 1.5.

Once you add up your total nights away for the month, enter the amount in the 'Driver' box. If your spouse is riding with you, you can claim Per Diem for them as well as long as there is a business reason for them being on the road. One example is if they were there to help load and unload the truck. You will total their Per Diem the same way (adding up total and partial days) and enter the monthly total in the 'Spouse' box.

When using your personally owned vehicle for business, you can write-off your miles. Enter the miles driven for each month in the box under 'Personal Vehicle Miles' and ProfitGauges will track your deductible automatically. If you park your truck at a lot and use a personal vehicle to drive home, those miles are not deductible. However, if your truck is in the shop getting maintenance done, the miles driven in a personal vehicle to and from the repair shop is deductible.

Once you've entered everything on this screen click on the green 'Next' button. The next page is where you'll enter your monthly expenses. We'll dive into this section in the next lesson.