There is no doubt about it – mystery shoppers spend a lot of time on the road. Whether you set your job search parameters to five miles from your house or fifty, you can absolutely spend a large part of your day driving around between mystery shopping site visit locations. In fact, some mystery shoppers will spend several hours a day in the car when they work the equivalent of full time hours. In a job where the saying, “Time is money” absolutely rings true, you can waste a lot of time and money alike if you don’t make an active effort to put that time to good use. Here are some top ways to get the most out of your time in the car:
Travel Write-Off. The government allows you to write off miles traveled for work-related functions, and this absolutely includes your miles traveled for your mystery shopping assignments. Each time you get in the car and travel to and from assignment locations, you should be keeping track of your business miles traveled in a mileage log. Then when take day rolls around, you likely will find that you can write off hundreds and even thousands of miles traveled over the course of a year. This can equate to hundreds and even thousands of dollars in a tax write off, so this is big money you don’t want to miss out on saving!
Review Time. If you are a safe driver, as every mystery shopper should strive to be, you don’t want to spend your time driving behind the wheel with one eye focused on reading assignment requirement paperwork. However, when you aren’t driving, you will want to take a few minutes to review your paperwork so your requirements are fresh in mind. When you are driving, you can run through your site visits mentally to prepare for a visit, or if you have just completed a site visit, you can also speak into a recording device to make verbal notes of things you need to remember, such as the employee names, times you entered and left the location, and more.
Trip Planning. As a mystery shopper, planning your day’s work is critical to saving time and making more money each day. Trip planning is vital, and so you will want to strive to work on several different assignments with each trip you make out of the house. Preferably, these trips out of the house will be to a single general location in the city so you aren’t wasting your time driving all over town. You will find that a little bit of trip planning on your part can save you a tremendous amount of time and money in the long run.
Make an effort to put some of these tips to use for you, and you will begin to realize the time saving and money saving efforts right away. Your time in the car is far too valuable to waste, so don’t delay in following these tips today!
First of all, I want to thank you for having a newsletter and forum for us mystery shoppers and auditors because it is a tremendous help. I am meticulous with spreadsheets, paperwork and receipts for accounts receivable and payable for this business because I am soon leaving my job of 3 years to do this full time and I am looking for information on what I can claim for taxes. Is there a book or any resource for our business because ours is not like any other in the general information out there.