Trip Boss by Creative Algorithms

My husband has his car on lease, and part of that lease is that you have to do a certain number of kilometres per year. He's a bit behind at the moment, so we've been trying to make up the shortfall by going for drives around our state every weekend. On the one hand, it's a bit of a pain that we have to do this, but actually I'm quite enjoying it because it means that we get to go to places that we might not otherwise have gone to.

So, our latest drive was the perfect opportunity to try out Trip Boss, which Justine at Creative Algorithms has kindly let me review.

I opened Trip Boss and was greeted by a screen filled with different tabs. From left to right, the tabs are: Trips, Trip Planner, Itineraries, Waypoints, Meals, Lodging, Fuel Economy, Misc Expense, Expenses, Budget, Journal, Pastimes, Summary, Graph and Ratings. As you can see, it's a comprehensive list!

Since the trip I went on was quite short, not all tabs were relevant to me, but I did try to use as many as I could in order to get a feel for the program. Before you can do anything, you have to create a new trip. Once you've created your trip, you can select it on the Trips tab, and then enter details about the trip, such as dates, places, travellers and a summary.

In the Trip Planner, you can make a new entry for each place you're visiting, and then create a record stating when you left one place and arrived at another. You can also keep track of how far the trip was, the time it took to get there and your average speed. You can lock various fields, so if you know when you left one place and arrived at another, you can lock them, and the other fields (distance and speed) are calculated.

The Itineraries tab lets you create various record types, such as car rental, flights, accommodation and meetings. When you tap New, you are given the choice of what type of itinerary to create, and the details to record vary depending on the type. The records are very comprehensive for each type, and it is obvious that a lot of thought has gone into planning what might need to be kept track of for each type. For example, the 'Flight' type allows you to record, other than the basic time and flight number, details such as your seat, what type of meal you have (Kosher or Vegetarian), confirmation status, and you can also export the flight details to the Date Book as an appointment and set an alarm.

The Waypoints tab lets you keep track of your odometer readings. Each record consists of the place, whether you are arriving or leaving, the date and time and the odometer reading. There are two different views - you can either view the actual odometer reading, or the distances travelled between each waypoint (the A->B view shown below).

The Meals tab allows you to record all the details of your meal, and can also calculate what each party owes in the case of a split bill. You can also assign a rating to the restaurant and make notes for future reference. All expenses created on other tabs (meals for example) are listed on the Expenses tab. Tapping on an expense takes you back to the original record.

As you would expect, the lodging and fuel economy tabs allow you to record all the details of hotel stays and fuel purchases.

The Misc Expenses tab allows you to record sundry items such as attraction entrance fees, gifts and groceries. You can also manage your budget. There are several budget types preloaded, but you can edit them to suit your needs. You enter your budget for each type and how much you spent, and the balance is calculated.

If you feel like making some notes while on your trip, you can use the Journal tab. As well as a diary entry, you can record the weather conditions, events and sights.

The Summary tab is a read-only information tab telling you various statistics about your trip - the total distance in miles and kilometres, your total travel and leisure time, average speed, fuel economy, and cost per mile/km. The Graph tab gives you a graphical summary of the money spent, fuel economy, distance and speed per day. The Ratings tab lists all the places and their ratings you've assigned to them.

Verdict:
Trip Boss is full of features - far too many for me to explore fully on my half-day trip! What I did see, though, I was very impressed with. This is a program with a very comprehensive feature set, and I can't think of anything that I would want to record that I can't in this application. Creative Algorithms' attention to detail is excellent - they seem to have thought of every piece of data you could possibly want to keep track of!

Something that would be nice, though, would be to have a Cancel option when creating new records (for example on the Meals, Lodging, Fuel Economy tabs) in case you change your mind, rather than having to go to the main menu and deleting the record. It would also be good if the program tracked whether a change had been made to a tab, so that if you create a new record but then change your mind and tap on another tab and no data has been entered in the record, it is deleted. The way it is at the moment, the blank record remains, and appears on other summary tabs, so it would be good to remove it, or at least have an option to do so.

Other than this minor point, Trip Boss is an excellent way of keeping track of all your trip details - I highly recommend it, particularly if you do a lot of business travelling and need to keep records of your expenses and flight/meeting information.

Trip Boss is available for $34.95 (or on CD-ROM for $41.95 including S&H) from Creative Algorithms.