Every setting, and what it changes

What it is

Six sections. Three of them feed calculations, and those are the ones worth getting right.

Vehicle & fuel

What you drive, what it runs on, your MPG or miles per kWh, and the price you pay. This is where your cost per mile comes from, which drives every fuel figure in the app.

The pump price is kept at the current UK average for you. Set your own and the weekly refresh leaves it alone until you reset it to the average.

Insurance

Annual, monthly, per hour worked, or not tracked. Left at not tracked, insurance is left out of every cost figure and your hourly rates come out higher than they are.

Change a rate and JoltMile asks whether to apply it to shifts you have already logged. Say no and past shifts keep the rate they were logged with.

An annual premium is also asked for the start date on the certificate, and a monthly one for how many months have already gone out this tax year. Either answer is what tells JoltMile the day your cover started, so the premium is not charged against days before you had it. See how insurance is spread.

Tax

• Personal allowance. Leave it on if you have added your job under Other income, because JoltMile gives the allowance to the wages first. Turn it off only if you have a job you would rather not enter, or your driving profit will look less taxable than it is.
• Class 4 National Insurance. Always included, and there is no switch for it. Every self-employed driver is liable for Class 4 once profit passes the threshold, so an estimate that left it out would just be wrong.

Preferences

Which day your week starts, your default platform and vehicle, which wizard steps to skip, whether to show the deadline reminders, and the switches for vibration, shift sounds and filling in postcodes from your location. None of these change a figure: they change how much typing you do.

Data

Backup, restore, CSV export and clearing your data. Covered properly in your data and backups.

Subscription

Your plan, and where to change or cancel it. Covered in account and billing.

Which settings are safe to change later

All of them. Nothing in Settings reaches backwards into a shift you have already logged, with one deliberate exception: an insurance rate change asks whether you want it applied retroactively, and only does it if you say yes.

Mistakes to avoid

• Changing your Settings fuel price to fix one old shift. It will not - edit that shift instead.
• Switching the personal allowance off AND adding your job under Other income. That takes the allowance away twice.
• Leaving insurance untracked because the form asked for a figure you did not have to hand.