Hello rwmacnamara,
Welcome, and thanks for joining us on this thread about entering trips into QuickBooks Online. I know many businesses like to have historical data in their books for a number of reasons. I like that you're also working with the Mileage feature in the program to make sure those numbers are entered. I can help you with this.
The Mileage feature is one of the newer additions to QuickBooks Online, and it gives you the opportunity to enter the kilometers for your trips and details for your vehicles. Whether you're setting up a vehicle for this year, for 2018, or even earlier, the Total business distance field is greyed out. This is because the field pulls data from the trips you've entered into the software using the Add trip button or through automatic tracking. This article goes over adding trips and includes a section about manually adding them: Automatically track mileage in QuickBooks Online
When trips are added, they can be sorted into business or personal trips, making sure that you have the details clearly organized in your books. When you enter the trips related to the vehicle, you'll see the numbers increase when you go back to the View vehicles option, including the business distance.
Given that, what you can do in this case is consider manually entering a trip for the 2018 year for that vehicle so you can see the amount of kilometers travelled in the program. When you enter a trip, it asks for a description, where you could make note that it's the total distance travelled for that year. That way, you'll know why there's one large trip logged.
I invite you to share any feedback you have about how the Mileage feature works with our product development team. On the Mileage page itself, there's a Share feedback button that you can take advantage of, or you can use these steps if you're not seeing that: How do I submit feedback? Feedback helps our team know how people are looking to use QuickBooks Online and consider changes they can make for future updates.
Don't hesitate if you have more questions.
