Taxbot: What Happened and What to Use Instead

The Taxbot app was acquired by Hurdlr and is no longer available as a standalone product. Former users were directed to move their tracking to Hurdlr or to another expense and mileage app that meets the same IRS substantiation rules Taxbot was built around.¹

What Happened to Taxbot

Taxbot was created by Sandy Botkin, a former IRS attorney and head of the Tax Reduction Institute. It was a mobile app focused on automatic mileage tracking and receipt capture for self-employed taxpayers and small business owners, and it built a following because it was designed around IRS audit requirements rather than general bookkeeping.

Hurdlr, a financial tracking platform for freelancers and independent workers, acquired Taxbot and folded its core functionality into the Hurdlr app.¹ The original Taxbot app is no longer available for download.

If you had data in Taxbot, whether it migrated cleanly depends on when you made the switch. Before you file your next return, open whatever app now holds your history and confirm that your trip logs, receipt images, and category assignments actually came across. Gaps discovered in April are gaps you cannot fix.

What Your Replacement Needs to Do

The reason Taxbot worked was not the branding. It was that the app produced records that satisfied the IRS. Any replacement has to clear the same bar.

For every deductible expense, the IRS wants proof of four things: the amount, the date, the place or description, and the business purpose. For meals and gifts, you also need to document the business relationship of the person you were with.²³ Without adequate records, the entire deduction can be disallowed.

The word that trips people up is “contemporaneous.” The IRS gives far more weight to records created at or near the time of the expense than to reconstructions assembled months later at tax time.² An app that logs a trip the moment you drive it, or captures a receipt the moment you pay, produces the kind of real-time documentation that holds up under audit. A spreadsheet filled in on April 14 does not.

For mileage specifically, your log needs the date, destination, business purpose, and miles driven for each trip. The IRS’s own sample daily log in Publication 463 also includes odometer start and stop readings, and at year-end you need total miles driven for all purposes so you can calculate the business-use percentage.²

For receipts, the IRS accepts electronic records, including photos of paper receipts, as long as the image clearly shows the vendor name, date, amount, and a description of the purchase. Receipts are specifically required for all lodging expenses and for any other individual expense of $75 or more.² The $75 threshold is not a free pass. You still need a record of every deduction you claim below that amount, and a bank or credit card statement is not on its own enough because it does not establish business purpose.

Records need to be kept for at least three years from the date you filed the return or the return’s due date, whichever is later.⁴ That period extends to six years if you underreported gross income by more than 25%.⁵ Keep everything for six years and you will not have to sort out which rule applies.

Features to Require in a Replacement

Coming from Taxbot, the feature set you need has not changed much, but the market has improved. The following is what actually matters when evaluating a replacement.

Automatic GPS mileage tracking. The app should detect drives passively and log the route, distance, and timestamp without you opening it. Classifying a trip as business or personal should take one swipe.
Receipt capture with OCR. Optical character recognition pulls the vendor, date, and amount from a photo. You should only need to add the business purpose and category.
Bank and credit card integration. Read-only connections to your financial accounts import transactions automatically, cutting manual entry and catching expenses you forgot to photograph.
Schedule C categorization. The app should map expenses to the correct Schedule C line items so your data is organized for filing rather than sitting in a pile.
Export and integration. Look for CSV export and direct connections to accounting or tax preparation software. Data trapped in an app with no way out becomes a problem at tax time.
Cloud storage with retention. Your records need to survive for at least three to six years. Confirm the app stores receipt images in the cloud and does not purge old data if you cancel your subscription.⁴

Security matters here too. You are connecting bank accounts and storing financial records, so look for apps that use bank-level encryption and have completed a SOC 2 audit or equivalent security certification. Free apps that monetize your transaction data are a poor trade for the convenience.

Why Contemporaneous Records Are Worth the Trouble

If the IRS audits your return and you cannot substantiate a deduction, the deduction is not reduced. It is disallowed entirely, your tax liability is recalculated, and a 20% accuracy-related penalty is added to the underpayment.⁶ That penalty applies whenever the underpayment results from negligence or disregard of the rules, and failing to keep adequate records is one of the clearest forms of negligence the IRS recognizes. Interest accrues on top from the original due date of the return.

This is the whole reason a real-time tracking app exists. Digital capture also solves the thermal-paper problem that plagued an earlier generation of record-keepers, where gas station and restaurant receipts fade to blank within months. A photo taken at the time of purchase, stored in the cloud, stays legible for as long as you need it.

Protecting Yourself From the Next Acquisition

One lesson from the Taxbot shutdown is worth internalizing before you commit to any replacement. Any app can be acquired, shut down, or pivoted. Export your data periodically and keep a local backup of the exports somewhere you control, whether that is a hard drive, an encrypted cloud folder, or both. The best expense tracking system is one you can walk away from without losing your records, and that principle is easier to enforce on day one than after the vendor changes hands.

1
Hurdlr. Taxbot – Hurdlr
2
Internal Revenue Service. Publication 463 (2025) – Travel, Gift, and Car Expenses
3
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 274 – Disallowance of Certain Entertainment, Etc., Expenses
4
Internal Revenue Service. How Long Should I Keep Records?
5
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 6501 – Limitations on Assessment and Collection
6
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 6662 – Imposition of Accuracy-Related Penalty on Underpayments