Odie is a new iPhone app from a Montréal developer that keeps your CRA mileage log for you, and its latest update adds CarPlay support.
If you drive for work and claim it at tax time, you already know the CRA wants a proper logbook. That means the date, destination, purpose and distance of every business trip, plus your odometer readings at the start and end of the year. Most people either scribble it in a notebook or try to rebuild it from memory in April, which is not fun.
Odie handles that in the background. It recognizes your car over Bluetooth or CarPlay, records each drive on its own and, when you park, asks whether the trip was Work or Personal with a single tap on the Lock Screen. At tax time it builds a year report using the CRA’s two-tier per-kilometre rate, along with the opening and closing odometer readings, so you can hand one PDF to your accountant.
Version 1.0.6 brings Work and Personal buttons to the Lock Screen and the CarPlay dashboard, plus CarPlay recognition over a wired or wireless connection. Odie can also now classify routes on its own. If your last eight trips on a route were all marked the same way, the next one gets sorted automatically, and one tap changes it if Odie gets it wrong.
Privacy is a big focus too. There’s no account to sign up for, no ads and no analytics, and your trips stay on your iPhone, with optional syncing through your own iCloud. The app and its reports are available in English and French.
Montréal developer Taylor Brown made Odie as an independent project, and it’s been on the App Store since September. This looks like a pretty helpful app if you’ve been trying to solve your work travel tracking.
Odie is free to download for iPhones running iOS 17 or later, with unlimited manual trips and 40 automatic trips a month, but after that, Odie Pro costs $4.99 CAD a month.
Taylor, the developer behind Odie, generously donated these promo codes to iPhone in Canada readers:
To redeem one, open the App Store, tap your profile photo, then tap Redeem Gift Card or Code. You can also use this redeem link and swap CODE at the end for your code. Each code works once, in Canada and the US, until April 10, 2027.
If you grab one, leave a comment saying which code you used so others know it’s taken.
How do you keep track of your work kilometres right now?
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