Feature Request: Cost field in Notes

[leif81]

I'm a new fuelly user. A convert from keeping spreadsheets in google docs. I really like it so far. The killer feature for me is adding fuelups from my cellphone via http://m.fuelly.com. Now I don't have to hang onto receipts until I get home to plug into my spreadsheet

However it won't quite replace my 'maintenance' spreadsheet. The notes feature on fuelly almost replace my maintenance spreadsheet but are missing a 'cost' field. What gives!

Obviously with a cost field you can do things like keep a running total for maintenance notes over the year and lifetime of the car.

With the spreadsheet data I then take the date and cost of the maintenance and plot it on a graph to better visualize how much money my car is costing over the years.

[pb]

This has come up a few times in the past and our standard answer has always been that we're trying focus solely on fuel economy rather than maintenance. We put the notes in place because maintenance definitely plays a role in fuel economy, but we didn't want to get into the whole business of sending alerts, getting recommended maintenance schedules for various models, and a whole slew of other features that are necessary for tracking maintenance. So we're interested in maintenance as it affects fuel economy, and not necessarily in how it affects your budget. There are many other budgeting apps out there that can do that kind of thing much better than we can.

So with this disclaimer in place, I think we probably could add a simple, optional Total field and start tracking maintenance price as a separate value. We'd need to come up with a way to show maintenance totals over time since we don't have that anywhere now. And we'd probably need to add a total cost somewhere with fuel + maintenance together.

It seems like a simple request, but once we open the door to tracking expenses, there could be a flood of requests for related features. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's also not quite what we set out to do with Fuelly.

[WalterBE]

Even a basic function to enter non-fuell costs could be useful. I would like it. Fuell is an important cost but the total cost can be very different where you live.

road tax, insurance, costs for ferry/brige/tunnel access, an extra tax that you pay depending where you drive and when, road support service