A logbook you can’t leave with isn’t a logbook — it’s a hostage situation with charts. Amperlo’s position is simple: everything you put in comes back out, in formats ordinary tools can read, whenever you want it. This post covers what you can export, exactly what’s in each file, and when an export beats the in-app reports (and when it doesn’t).
The charging sessions export
On the Sessions page, alongside your charging history, there’s a CSV export. It produces a file named for the day you exported it, with one row per charging session and these columns:
- Date — the session date, following the 4am session-day rule, so late-night charges sit on the day you actually drove.
- Source — home, public, marina or gratis.
- Network and Location — who sold you the electricity and where.
- kWh and Rate (p) — energy delivered and the pence-per-kWh you paid for it.
- Cost ex VAT, VAT, Cost inc VAT — three separate columns, of which more below.
- SoC start and SoC end — battery percentage either side of the charge, where recorded.
- Notes — whatever you wrote at the time.
That’s a complete, self-describing record of a session. Open it in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets and it pivots, filters and totals like any other table — no proprietary format, no import wizard, no interpretation required.
The odometer export
The Odometer page has its own CSV export, and it’s built with the same care. Each row carries the exact timestamp the reading was recorded, the session date it belongs to, the odometer value, the daily delta since the previous reading (calculated for you, so the spreadsheet work is already done), the battery state of charge if noted, how the reading was captured, and any notes.
One detail worth calling out: the export respects your distance unit. If your account is set to kilometres in Settings, the odometer values and deltas come out in kilometres, with the unit named in the column headings so there’s never any doubt what you’re reading. Your export matches how you think, not how the database happens to store things.
The three-column VAT split, and why your accountant will care
Every cost in Amperlo is stored with its VAT split intact — the ex-VAT amount, the VAT itself, and the inclusive total are all kept as recorded, never derived from each other after the fact. The sessions export carries all three as separate columns.
If you’re VAT-registered, this is the difference between an evening of arithmetic and a five-minute job. Public and marina charging in the UK carries 20% VAT, and for business use that VAT is reclaimable. Filter the export to the quarter, sum the VAT column, and you have your reclaim figure — with a session-by-session breakdown behind it if anyone ever asks. Handing your accountant a CSV where the VAT is already a column of its own is the sort of thing that keeps your bill down and their opinion of you up.
Backups: the everything-net
CSV exports are for reading and analysis. Underneath them, Amperlo also keeps automated daily JSON backups covering the last 90 days, and you can trigger one on demand from Settings → Data. Where the CSVs are shaped for spreadsheets, the backup is the full-fidelity copy of your account’s records — and restore is symmetric, rehydrating the same shape. It’s the answer to a different question: not “what did Q2 cost?” but “is my data safe, and could I take all of it somewhere else?” Yes, and yes.
Exports versus in-app reports
It’s worth being clear about what exports are not for, because Amperlo also has reporting built in, and the two serve different masters.
The in-app surfaces — the Dashboard, Analytics, the Costs page, Trips — are live views, recomputed from your source records every time you look. Log a session and every figure that should change, changes. They’re for questions you ask repeatedly, where you want today’s answer: what’s my cost per mile this month, how’s the spend split by source, what has this trip cost so far.
An export is the opposite: a snapshot, frozen at the moment you made it. That’s a weakness if you use it as a dashboard — it starts going stale immediately — and a strength everywhere else. A tax return wants the year as it stood when you filed. An expense claim wants the numbers you actually claimed. A dispute with a charging network wants the record as it was, not as it evolved.
- Use the app for living questions: current costs, trends, comparisons, this month versus last.
- Use an export for frozen ones: filings, claims, evidence, your own archive — and for any analysis Amperlo doesn’t do, since your spreadsheet has no feature ceiling.
Why this is policy, not a feature
Easy exit is the honest foundation for a paid product. If the only thing keeping you subscribed were the difficulty of leaving, the incentive to keep improving the product would rot. Because your records walk out the door in open formats any time you like, the reason to stay has to be that the app keeps earning it — which is exactly the pressure a product should be under. Your charging history is a record of your money and your movements. It was always yours; the export button is just the proof.
Start the record at amperlo.com — free for one vehicle, no card required, and everything you log is yours to take with you from day one.
