Insurance now builds up a day at a time

If you have set up an annual or monthly insurance premium in JoltMile, the way it is charged against your driving has changed. It is now converted to a flat daily rate and charged one day at a time, from the day your cover started.

What was wrong

A monthly premium used to be dumped onto whichever shifts happened to fall in that calendar month, split by hours. One four-hour shift in an otherwise quiet month carried the entire month's premium. On a £100 policy that is £25 an hour of insurance on a single shift, while the same £100 in a busy 80-hour month came out at £1.25 an hour. Same policy, wildly different answer, decided by how much else you drove.

An annual premium had the opposite problem. Your costs counted the whole thing as spent from the first day of the tax year, so two months in, your expenses said £1,200 had gone out when £200 had.

What it does now

Whatever you entered is turned into a daily rate. An annual premium is divided by the number of days in the tax year, and a monthly one is multiplied by twelve first. A £100 monthly policy is £1,200 a year, which is £3.29 a day.

Your insurance so far is then that daily rate multiplied by the days since your cover started. Eighty days in, at £3.29 a day, that is £263.20. It moves a bit each day rather than jumping on a renewal date.

For a single shift, that day's £3.29 is split across the shifts you worked that day, weighted by hours. A day you did not drive still counts toward the running total, it just has no shift to sit on. Work one shift on a day and it carries the whole day, which is exactly what a pay as you go rate per hour would have given you.

What you will notice

• On an annual policy, your insurance so far drops from the full premium to what has actually accrued. Nothing has changed about what you paid, only about when JoltMile counts it.
• A shift in a quiet month stops showing an insurance cost that looks like a mistake. That £100 premium now puts one day's slice on the shift instead of the whole month's.
• All Time and a single tax year now work your hourly rate out the same way. They used to disagree, because All Time read the year total where a tax year read the apportioned figure.

One new question in Settings

Because accrual now starts on the day your cover started, JoltMile needs to know which day that was. An annual premium is asked for the start date on the certificate. A monthly one is asked how many months have already gone out this tax year, which comes to the same thing. Leave either blank and you are taken as insured all along, which is the right answer if you have held the same cover for years.

Answer it and every tax year recalculates from that date, so a policy taken out in September is not charged for the summer.