Two weeks touring Scotland. A three-day site visit for work. A month of school runs you would like to see priced separately from everything else. The awkward truth about journey-level cost tracking is that nobody decides in advance which stretches of driving they will later want numbers for — the question always arrives after the fact. Amperlo’s Trips feature is built around that reality: a trip is not something you start and stop in the moment, it is a label you apply to history.
A trip is a saved, named range
On the Trips page you create a trip by giving it a name and a range. That range can be one of two things: a pair of dates, or a pair of odometer readings. “Scotland, 4–18 June” is a date trip. “Leeds site visit, 41,200 to 41,860 miles” is an odometer trip. Either way, the trip is saved and stays on the list — it is a living report, not a one-off query. Open it any time and Amperlo assembles everything it knows about that window: the charging sessions that fell inside it, the energy used, what it cost, and the miles covered.
This is why you do not need to have done anything at the time. If your charges were logged — whether through Quick Log, a receipt upload, or a forwarded email — the trip simply collects the ones that fall in its range. Reconstructing that fortnight in Scotland in October is the same operation as reviewing last week: name it, bound it, open it.
How odometer trips find their dates
Charging sessions live on dates, so an odometer-bounded trip has to be translated into a date window before it can collect anything. Amperlo does this by looking through your odometer log for the reading nearest each end of the range and using those readings’ dates as the window. The more mileage entries you keep, the tighter that translation is — another quiet argument for the ten-second odometer log in Quick Log.
There is a sanity check built in: if the nearest recorded reading is more than a thousand miles away from the figure you asked for, Amperlo treats it as no match rather than quietly anchoring your trip to a wildly wrong week. A trip that resolves to the wrong fortnight would be worse than one that honestly says it has too little data to resolve at all.
Backfilling miles with the JLR CSV import
All of this leans on having mileage history, and this is where owners of Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles get a shortcut. The manufacturer’s app records every journey the car makes and will export the lot as a CSV file. Amperlo imports that file directly: your entire driving history — including every journey you made before you had ever heard of Amperlo — lands in your odometer log in one go.
The import is careful in three specific ways:
- It is unit-aware. The JLR export names its distance column differently depending on the car’s settings — Distance(miles) or Distance(km). Amperlo reads the header, works out which unit it is dealing with, and converts accordingly. A kilometre file will not silently inflate your mileage by 60%.
- It is idempotent. Import the same file twice — or a fresh export that overlaps the last one — and rows at or below your last known odometer reading are skipped. Re-importing every month with a cumulative export is safe by design; you cannot double-count a journey.
- It is diff-reviewed. Before anything is written, Amperlo shows you exactly what the file will add — what is new, what is being skipped — and you confirm. No import applies itself silently.
Together, these mean the workflow can be as lazy as you like: export from the JLR app whenever you remember, feed the whole file to Amperlo, glance at the diff, confirm. The odometer log stays continuous, and every odometer-bounded trip you define afterwards has dense data to resolve against.
What a trip tells you
Once resolved, a trip is a self-contained answer to “what did that journey cost?”. The charging sessions inside the window, the kWh they delivered, the money they cost — with the VAT split preserved on public charging, since Amperlo stores ex-VAT and inc-VAT amounts on every session. For a business trip, that turns “can you itemise your travel costs?” from an evening of spreadsheet archaeology into opening a saved page. For the Scotland fortnight, it settles the holiday’s real energy bill instead of a guess.
And because trips persist, they compound. Do the same client run every quarter and you accumulate a comparable series; name each one consistently and the Trips page becomes a journey-level history of the car, sitting alongside the day-level view in Analytics and the whole-life view in Costs.
Where the features sit
The trip CSV import is part of the free tier — anyone can backfill their mileage history from a JLR export at no cost. Saved trips are part of the paid plan (£4.99/mo), alongside AI receipt parsing, email intake, and the maintenance ledger, for up to three vehicles.
If there is a journey in your past you have always vaguely wondered about — the big holiday, the season of long commutes — the data to answer it may already exist in your charging history. Sign up at amperlo.com, get your sessions and mileage in, and let a saved trip do the remembering for you.
