The car Bibles product reviews: GasDandy mileage tracking software.
Product Reviews
GasDandy mileage tracking software
Tested February 2007 
Website: www.gasdandy.com
If you've read my fuel & engine bible, you'll know I use an online mileage-tracking service from GreenHybrid.com. When I was looking around for a way to track my mileage, there were a few bits of software here and there but none of them quite did what I wanted. In February 2007 I discovered GasDandy. The idea is really simple: track your mileage and fuel costs and have the software generate small reports for you. The software is free to try (available from the GasDandy website) and the trial version allows 5 sets of data to be entered. The full piece of software is $14.95.
In use, GasDandy is pretty easy. You set it up with a couple of named data items - typically your car(s) and/or motorbike(s). Then, each time you start it, you can choose one of your vehicles and enter in some basic information from your most recent fill up. This includes how much the petrol cost you, the mileage (total odometer reading) and the number of gallons of petrol used. Note that there is a metric version available from the website too if you want to work in litres and kilometres. My only bone of contention here is that it insists you enter the total odometer reading. A lot of car nuts track their mileage using the trip meter. It would have been nice for GasDandy to allow total odometer or most recent trip meter reading. Because of that I took one star off my review rating.
Because GasDandy is tracking your mileage, you can enter in oil-change intervals and tyre rotation dates and it will remind you when its time to get an oil change or a tyre rotation, which is a neat feature. It also allows you to keep track of any mileage driven for business along with notes to remind yourself about the what, where and why of the business trips.
Finally, GasDandy allows you to print out basic reports and generate graphs. The graphing function is a nice touch as it shows the overall average mpg for your vehicle and colour-codes the graph nodes green or red depending on whether that tank was above or below average, respectively.
Summary.
GasDandy is a simple (ie. not bloated), inexpensive piece of software that will help you keep track of mileage. The interface could do with some eye-candy - it has a distinct 90's feel to it - and like I said, it would be nice to be able to put trip-mileage as well as total mileage, but apart from that, I like it. The screenshots below show the main mileage interface, and the graph screen.
