On The Road with Trip Boss

As promised, I am reporting from the road while I tour NY State Universities with my daughter. One of the applications I installed for the trip was Trip Boss by Creative Algorithms. Here is another Palm appliciation that promises to make your trip easier by allowing you to store your itineraries, expenses, and other trip-related information. When launched, you are presented with a number of tabs across the top representing itineraries, gas, hotel, and more. I created a new trip, College Visits, and began entering the various stops along the way. I quickly learned that while the program offers many ways to store the data, there isn't a connection between a lot of the data, requiring a lot of redundant data entry. For instance, if I enter a hotel in my itinerary, shouldn't I see that on my hotel page, and vice-versa? No, hotel expenses have to be entered from scratch on the hotel tab. And as I manually enter the distances between stops on my itinerary, shouldn't they be automatically entered on the mileage page? No, they have to be entered in manually.
This program has been highly rated by a number of folks. Perhaps I just don't get it. But I spend a lot of time on the road and I expect my travel applications to simplify my record keeping. Trip Boss doesn't do it for me.

So what DO I use? I use my trusty SplashNotes, with an outline entitled Work Time. In this, I have daily entries for hours worked, mileage traveled, and tolls paid. It is quick and efficient. When I get home, I sync my Treo to my laptop and use the deskktop SplashNotes appliciation to cut and paste my time and expenses directly into a QuickBooks invoice.

I've tried a number of expense tracking applications. I am not saying Trip Boss and other programs like it don't have their place for some folks, but, for me, they all add a layer of complexity to what should otherwise be a simple solution.