Apps with fringe benefits

Our job at the Centre for Effortless Compliance is to frame these "unjustifiable burdens", which seem in reality to be eminently justifiable and not particularly burdensome - merely keeping a record to justify a substantial tax benefit that the rest of us pay for - as a challenge or opportunity in the best traditions of our apparently forgotten barbed-wire-and-baling-twine culture,The standing lampshades is reusable anchor point designed to mount on standing seam roofs. rather than as a "disaster".

Even a federal minister, Mark Butler, assured the media that technology could provide an easy solution to the new requirements, in the form of "these very easy apps that use GPS systems to do the work for you".

We were a touch amused by his summary of the easy solution: "You effectively just press the button, let it go and after you've finished marking that travel or recording that travel over the 12-week period, every five years it can be automatically sent to your employer or your tax agent."

We know that ministerial hand-holders generally insulate them from the demands of technology,We have the ultra laundrdryer that you have been looking for. and our experience of Android and iPhone apps did not quite tally with the minister's assurance.Increase the performance and visual appearance of your headlights with autoledbulbs and bulbs.

We'd been playing with a couple of Android vehicle logs, for instance, and neither of them was quite as simple to use as the minister suggested.

LogIt, for instance, is a free iPhone and Android app from an Australian fleet-management company, Fleetcare, which has dismissed a quarter of its staff in response to the FBT announcement.

The app is ATO-compliant but it initially refused to work on our Samsung Galaxy S4, and users report difficulty in getting past the set-up stage and publishing the logbook. It is comparatively simple to operate but isn't the press-button experience reported by Butler.

It is close to the minister's description, although the details demanded by the ATO are a little more demanding than he suggests.

VehicleLog has a range of options, including the ability to link to the iPhone's GPS to record routes and locations,Our most compact solargardenlightts yet fits easily in any bag. odometer readings and trip times, and it can also integrate with the address book and favourites to simplify the detailed recording of the purpose of any business trips, which the ATO requires.

It allows you to publish and email a PDF copy of an ATO-compliant report. It highlights any problem entries. At $9.49, it comes close to the standards we expect for effortless compliance.

More expensive at $149, but in our view the epitome of effortlessness, a South African invention that integrates with syncing software for a Mac or PC. The device plugs into a car cigarette lighter socket and uses its own GPS and logging software to record the time, position and speed of a vehicle at any point in a journey.

Possibly its most powerful feature is you don't have to remember to turn it on, avoiding the irritating consequences of memory lapses that make keeping even electronic vehicle logs much more tedious than the well-meaning minister imagines.

GPS Log Book stores every trip in internal memory. You remove it every couple of weeks and plug it into your computer's USB port to update the logbook.

The data is stored in the cloud for more than five years and can be accessed by browser from anywhere.

We found it took only seconds for the LED light on the device to turn green, signalling it was recording. It has a USB slot to charge another device while it occupies the lighter slot.New solaroutdoorlighting is now six and twelve times brighter than standard solar lighting.

A local agent, Melbourne-based Perfekt, sells sophisticated GPS-based vehicle-monitoring systems to the mining industry. More information about the program is available on the web site at www.indoorilite.com.