How Shiftly works

1. The big picture

Once you link your Rivian, Shiftly watches your vehicle’s live data (gear, odometer, and location) in the cloud. From that it builds two things:

• Trips: a driving session, made up of one or more drives. A trip is what you see as a single entry on the Trips tab.
• Reports: weekly and monthly summaries that split your miles into business and personal, generated automatically on a schedule.

Everything is automatic. You don’t press start or stop; your only job is to tag each drive as business or personal so the right miles count toward your deduction, and a car that always drives for the same reason can be set to do even that on its own (section 7).

The same connection logs your charging sessions, home AC and public DC alike, on the Charging tab. That’s separate from mileage and needs no tagging; the rest of this guide is about trips, drives, and reports.

2. Trips: your driving sessions

A trip is one driving session. It groups together all the driving you do between longer stops. For example, a full evening of rideshare runs, or a day of visiting clients, is usually one trip made of several drives.

When a trip starts

A trip begins the moment your Rivian shifts into Drive or Reverse while no trip is already in progress, whether you’re at home or anywhere else. There’s nothing to tap. While a trip is open, you’ll see a “Trip in progress” banner on the Trips tab.

Each vehicle has its own trips, so if you drive more than one connected Rivian you can have more than one trip going at the same time.

3. When a trip ends on its own

Shiftly closes a trip automatically once you’ve clearly stopped driving:

• Parked at home for ~30 minutes. When the car is at your home location and stays parked for about half an hour, the trip is closed.
• Parked anywhere for ~5 hours. Away from home, Shiftly waits longer before deciding the session is over, so a long working day with meal breaks stays one trip, while an overnight stop ends it.

A trip’s end time is set to when you actually parked, not when Shiftly noticed. If the car was asleep and we only catch up later (or after a reconnect), the trip is still recorded as ending at the real park time, so durations stay honest.

Trips that aren’t saved

Sessions under about half a mile are discarded, because nudging the car around the driveway isn’t a trip. That half-mile floor is fixed and applies to the trip as a whole; the Minimum drive distance setting in section 5 is a separate control that trims individual legs. As a safety check against odometer glitches, a single trip is also capped at 1,000 miles.

When a trip closes, Shiftly notifies you so you don’t have to go looking for it. Whether that’s a nudge to tag the trip or a note saying it was tagged for you depends on the car’s Default tag, covered in section 7.

4. Ending a trip yourself

You don’t have to wait for the automatic close. There are two ways to end a trip yourself:

“End trip”: finish now, keep tracking on

Tap the “Trip in progress” banner to open the live trip, hit End & tag, and confirm. This finalizes the current trip right away so you can tag it immediately, instead of waiting for it to close on its own. Tracking stays on, and your next drive starts a fresh trip.

• Park first. You can only end a trip once the car is parked. If you’re still moving, Shiftly asks you to park before ending, because finishing mid-drive would record an incomplete trip.
• Any distance is kept. When you end a trip yourself, it’s saved no matter how short (even a 0.1-mile errand), because you intentionally recorded it.

“Stop data collection”: finish now, and pause tracking

In Settings, turning off data collection for a vehicle also closes the trip in progress, then stops tracking that vehicle until you switch it back on. Any qualifying trip is saved and ready to tag. Use this when you want privacy or a break from tracking; see the Privacy Policy for what stopping collection means for your data.

5. Drives inside a trip

A trip is split into one or more drives, the individual legs of your session. Drives are what you tag as business or personal.

How a trip gets split into drives:

• A short stop (under 10 minutes) keeps you in the same drive. A quick drop-off, a red light, or grabbing coffee doesn’t start a new leg.
• A longer stop (10 minutes or more) ends the current drive. The next time you pull away, a new drive begins within the same trip.

So a single rideshare evening might be one trip containing a dozen drives, one per passenger leg, which lets you tag each leg independently.

Ten minutes is only the default, and both halves of this are yours to change in Settings.

• New drive after parking sets the gap that splits a drive. Leave it at 10 minutes, tighten it to 5, stretch it to 15 or 30, or choose Immediately so every park at all starts a new leg.
• Minimum drive distance then drops the legs too short to be worth listing, at 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.5, or 1 mile (shown in metres and kilometres if that’s the unit you picked). It starts at Off, which keeps every drive no matter how short.

Both apply to your whole account rather than a single car, and neither one changes the fixed half-mile floor on a trip from section 3.

6. How miles are measured

Mileage comes straight from your Rivian’s odometer, not from estimating GPS points. Each drive’s distance is simply the odometer reading where it ended minus where it started, and a trip’s total is measured the same way across the whole session.

Because it’s the real odometer, the number matches your car exactly and holds up if you’re ever audited. Readings that don’t make sense (a negative distance, or more than 1,000 miles) are treated as glitches and dropped rather than saved.

7. Tagging: business vs. personal

Tagging is the one thing Shiftly needs from you, and further down you can hand even that to the car. Each drive is labeled either:

• Business: counts toward your mileage deduction.
• Personal: kept separate and excluded from the deduction.

Until you label it, a drive is Untagged. Open a trip from the Trips tab to tag each drive, or use the bulk actions at the bottom of the trip to label every remaining drive at once. You can also tag straight from a report’s “needs tagging” list, and you can re-tag a drive any time.

If you run more than one business, define them in Settings and tag a Business drive to a specific one. Your reports then break the business half down per business, which is what a Schedule C per-entity mileage line needs.

Default tag: letting a car tag itself

If a car is almost always driven for one purpose, you don’t have to label it by hand at all. On the Vehicle tab, set that car’s Default tag to Business or Personal. Every trip that closes on its own then has its still-untagged drives filed that way as it closes, and the notification you get tells you what was filed instead of asking you to go tag it.

Pick a default business for the car as well and its Business drives land under that business rather than as generic Business. The setting is per vehicle, so a work truck can tag itself while the family car stays manual.

The Default tag starts at Off, which is the manual flow described above. Ending a trip yourself with End & tag always tags manually no matter what the default says, and an automatic tag is only a starting point: you can re-tag any drive afterwards exactly like one you labeled yourself.

Both of these notifications have their own switches on the car’s Notifications page, so you can silence the nudge, the receipt, or both without turning off Shiftly’s other alerts. Silencing one only stops the message. The trip still closes, the Default tag still files it, and the Trips tab still shows whatever needs tagging.

Tagging updates your reports immediately: the affected week’s business/personal split refreshes on the spot, and a monthly report that was only waiting on that drive becomes available right away, with no need to wait for the next scheduled run.

8. Weekly reports

A weekly report summarizes a single week (Monday through Sunday) for each vehicle, splitting its miles into Business, Personal, and Untagged.

• When it’s created: automatically every Monday at about 3:00 AM Pacific Time, covering the previous week that just ended.
• What it needs: at least one completed trip for that vehicle during the week. A weekly report is created even if some drives are still untagged, and those miles simply show up in the Untagged bucket until you label them.
• Staying current: when you tag a drive from a past week, that week’s report recalculates immediately, moving miles out of Untagged and into Business or Personal.

Because a week’s report is created after the week ends, the current in-progress week doesn’t have a weekly report yet. It appears the following Monday.

9. Monthly reports

A monthly report summarizes a full calendar month per vehicle. Unlike weekly reports, a monthly report is only finalized once every drive in that month is tagged, since it’s meant to be a clean, complete record.

• The month has to be over. On the 1st of each month (~3:00 AM Pacific), Shiftly lines up the month that just ended as a report to complete.
• It completes once fully tagged. A background pass runs every day at about 4:00 AM Pacific and finalizes any past month whose drives are now all tagged. Until then, the month shows as “needs tagging” with a count of the drives still to label.
• Tagging the last drive finishes it instantly. When you tag the final untagged drive of a past month, its report becomes available right away, so you don’t have to wait for the 4:00 AM pass.

10. Why a report hasn’t appeared

If you’re expecting a report and don’t see it, here’s why:

Weekly

• The week isn’t over. The current week’s report is created the following Monday morning.
• No completed trips that week. If the vehicle had no qualifying trips (or only sub-half-mile moves that weren’t saved), there’s nothing to report.
• A trip is still in progress. Only completed trips are counted; an open trip is included once it closes.

Monthly

• The month hasn’t ended yet. Monthly reports are only built for months that are over.
• Some drives are still untagged. This is the most common reason. A monthly report waits until every drive that month is labeled. Tag the remaining drives and it appears immediately. Look for the “needs tagging” indicator on the month.

11. Dates, weeks & time zones

Shiftly groups your driving by calendar day, week, and month so a late-night drive counts on the day you actually drove it. Every report is bucketed in your own time zone, which you pick in Settings (US and Canadian zones are supported). A drive just before or after midnight is attributed to the calendar day it falls on where you are, not on a server clock somewhere else.

The scheduled times above (3:00 AM, 4:00 AM) are when the jobs themselves wake up, on Pacific time, far enough west that a week or month has ended for every North American user before Shiftly aggregates it. They don’t change which day your driving lands on; that’s always your zone.

Individual trips are shown in the time zone the vehicle was actually in, so a drive across a zone boundary reads correctly at both ends rather than being flattened into one clock.

12. Turning tracking on and off

Tracking is controlled per vehicle in Settings. Turn it on once and Shiftly collects from your Rivian in the background, even when the app is closed, with nothing running on your phone and no phone GPS or battery drain.

Turn it off any time for privacy; that ends the current trip and pauses collection for that vehicle until you turn it back on. You can also delete your account and all associated data whenever you choose. For the full details on what’s collected and how it’s protected, see the Privacy Policy.

13. Tax-time export

Today, your weekly and monthly reports keep a running, tagged record of your business miles all year. An annual report you can download is on the way, formatted for the IRS standard mileage deduction so you can hand it to your accountant or tax software.

Questions about how any of this works? Email us at support.rideshiftly@gmail.com.