Travel and journeys
Two tabs, and the split between them is worth holding on to:
- Travel is where you were: trips, stays, and the day counts that come out of them, and the transport and hotels that got you there.
- Journeys is the miles you drove: your own vehicle, and what you can claim for it.
Why this is not just the timesheet again
Your timesheet records work. This records presence, and the two are not the same. A Saturday abroad with no work done leaves no trace in a timesheet, so a day count built from your hours alone under-reports, which is the dangerous direction when the number is a legal limit.
So trips and stays are kept in their own record, and your timesheet is used to corroborate them: Muster compares country-tagged entries against the stays and tells you when you worked somewhere you have no stay recorded.
Home, and the stays that record themselves
Set your home town in Settings › Home and workplace: type the town and pick it, or, when you are at home, I'm at home: use where I am. Only the town is kept, never your exact spot.
With a home town set:
- Days you work away from your home country are recorded as stays by themselves, from your timesheet: the night in Atlanta on the way out, and Mexico since the day it began, left open while you are still there. Each is named by its town. The app says what it recorded: Recorded from your timesheet: …
- A day at home needs no stay. The day a trip lands home is not asked about.
- A travel clock-out moves the stays. Landing at home closes the stay you left on the day you arrived. Landing anywhere else closes it and opens a stay where you landed.
- Nothing you have recorded yourself is overruled.
Towns are looked up on the Muster server itself (every town of more than 5,000 people, from GeoNames), so your position is not sent anywhere else.
Travel
The screen, top to bottom
Where you are now: country, since when, and how many days.
The gauges: the limits that matter. Each is a figure with a rail across the top carrying its state: fine, worth a look, past a line that matters.
Needs attention: the audit, below.
Timeline: the record as a sequence of stays. Tap a stay to change it.
Transport and hotels: flights, taxis, trains, ferries, hire cars and hotels.
Days by country: the totals.
From a confirmation, Add trip, Add stay, Home assumption: the ways to put something in. Each has a Cancel beside its button while you have typed something unsaved, which puts the form back.
With no signal, the day counts wait: they are worked out on the server, and the screen says so rather than showing old ones.
How the counting works
The arrival day and the departure day each count as a whole day. Both the Schengen and the US rules count this way. A Paris-to-London flight on the 5th puts the 5th in France and the UK, so per-country totals legitimately add up to more than the calendar. Muster says how many travel days are involved rather than leaving you to wonder.
Schengen is 90 days in any rolling 180, counted back from a date: not a calendar period, and not reset by an anniversary. Membership is dated, so a window spanning a country's accession is still counted correctly. Ireland and Cyprus are in the EU but not in Schengen. Monaco, San Marino and the Vatican are counted, because there are no border controls.
The United States allows 90 days per admission, and a layover is an admission: clearing immigration in Atlanta starts the clock. Critically, a trip to Canada, Mexico or an adjacent island does not end an admission; the clock runs straight through it. Treating that as two short visits would report compliance where there is none, so consecutive US stays bridged only by those countries are merged into one admission.
These counts are Muster's arithmetic on the record you gave it. They are a tool for staying clear of a limit, not an immigration ruling.
Trips and stays
A trip is a name to hang things on (Mexico commissioning), with a purpose and notes.
A stay is where you were and between which dates:
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Trip | Which trip it belongs to |
| Country | The one that counts. It starts blank, so nothing is recorded until you pick one |
| Arrive / Depart | Leave Depart empty while you are still there |
| Kind | Stay, or Layover for same-day transit |
| Place | City, site, airport |
| Notes | Flight, hotel, passport stamp, ESTA note: anything that helps future-you trust the record |
Arriving somewhere closes the stay you were in
A journey is two things happening, and recording only the arrival leaves the record contradicting itself. An open stay counts as "still there" through to today, so an open Mexican stay plus any later British one overlap, and the audit will refuse to resolve them. Closing the old stay on the same date produces exactly the shared travel day the arithmetic expects.
After a travel clock-out, the Travel time saved card says what was recorded for you. When a stay is still to be added, it says that adding it also closes the stay you left, on the day you arrived, because a travel day counts in both countries, and one tap does both. Done closes the card when there is nothing left to add.
Changing a stay
Tap a stay on the timeline and it opens in Change this stay: its country and place, and its Arrive and Depart dates. Change either date and press Save stay; leave Depart empty if you are still there. Only your latest stay can be left open: emptying Depart on an older one is refused, naming the stay that comes after it.
Remove this stay deletes it, after asking. If your timesheet has you working there and your home town is set, Muster records those days as a stay again.
A change moves your day counts - Schengen, the US 90 days, days by country - and never your pay, which comes from your hours. The server keeps what the stay said before. It needs a signal: with none, the sheet says so and the stay is left as it was.
Needs attention
The audit states what is wrong or unknown rather than fixing it:
| Finding | What it means |
|---|---|
| Gaps | Dates the record says nothing about. Not days at home: a count built across a gap under-reports |
| Overlaps | Two stays genuinely claiming the same days. A contradiction, and Muster will not pick a winner |
| Travel days | A shared arrive/depart day. Entirely normal, listed so that a country total exceeding the calendar makes sense |
| Open stays | Somewhere you have not recorded leaving |
| Worked in X with no stay recorded there | Your timesheet puts you somewhere your travel record does not |
When a panel on this screen could not be filled at all, the screen says so at the top, because an empty Needs attention would otherwise read as good news.
Where did you stay?
When there are days worked with no stay recorded, the same finding appears on Today, below the clock buttons, because that is where you already are.
It proposes the answer from your timesheet: Your timesheet has you in Mexico since 24 Aug, and one tap on Add the stay records it, left open while you are still there. It closes when you travel home and add the stay you arrive in. Change the dates first opens the stay form already filled in, for an arrival before the first shift. A stay added this way starts on the first day you worked; if you arrived earlier, tap it on the timeline and change Arrive.
With a home town set, most of these are recorded for you and the question stops coming.
Transport and hotels
The card under the timeline holds everything that got you somewhere other than your own vehicle: flights, taxis, trains, ferries, hire cars and hotels. A journey of one of those kinds, from the Journey card on Today or added here, is filed here rather than on Journeys. They use the same journey form as Journeys (see The journey form).
A taxi carries its fare, not miles: what it cost, in the currency you paid it in (pounds, euros, dollars, pesos or zloty). Nothing is converted, and a fare nobody wrote down stays blank rather than £0.00.
A hire car is transport, so it is here, though it can still be measured by road.
From a confirmation
Paste an airline confirmation email, or the calendar invite attached to it, and press Read it. Muster pulls the flights out of it. Paste the whole thing; the useful part is usually buried.
A booking reference on its own cannot be looked up; it belongs to the airline that issued it.
Home assumption
Fill unknown days as sets a country for days the record says nothing about. Recorded days and assumed days stay separate, and assumed days are marked as such: this is for convenience at home, not evidence at a border.
Journeys
Journeys is the mileage screen: your own vehicle, and nothing else. (A journey whose kind was never set is here too, so it can be found and put right.) At the top is one figure, Personal vehicle miles this tax year, which starts on 6 April. HMRC's approved rate steps down after 10,000 business miles in a tax year, so the figure counts every drive, claimed or not.
Under it, Before you claim says what is not yet claimed, and names any drive with no miles yet. A drive with no figure cannot be claimed until it has one. Mark all claimed up to today is for the day a claim goes in.
Self-employed, your drives go on invoices, not on an employer's claim: the card is Before you invoice, it names any drive with no miles yet, because an invoice cannot charge one, and there is no claim line, Claimed box or Claimed for mileage switch.
The list below is laid out like the Log: the same period strip, so a month picked on Journeys is the month on Log and Summary too, and a folding card for each day saying how many journeys it holds and how many miles.
Muster counts miles; it does not price them. What a mile is worth is your employer's to say, so no rate is applied.
The journey form
Tap a journey to open it in a sheet; Add journey opens an empty one.
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Kind | Flight, Taxi, Hire car, Personal vehicle, Train, Ferry, Hotel, Other. Personal vehicle and Other are on Journeys; the rest on Travel |
| Date | The day it set off |
| Finished on a later day | Shows Ends, for an overnight drive or a flight that lands the next day |
| From / To | Where it started and where it ended |
| Miles | Leave blank if you were not driving. Blank is not zero: a flight has no mileage, and a drive nobody has measured is a gap. Muster keeps the two apart |
| Fare | A taxi only, in place of Miles: what it cost, and the currency |
| Claimed for mileage | Ticked when the drive has gone on a claim |
| Reference | Flight number, booking reference |
| Notes | Fare, receipt, who with |
| Part of a trip | Optional |
Save turns amber once something has changed. Cancel closes the sheet without saving, and Delete is at the foot.
Measuring a drive by road
A drive, a hire car or an Other journey with a position at each end can be measured. Measure by road fills in the miles; it is offered while there is no figure yet. Choose the route you took asks the map for the roads between the two ends: the quickest, the one with the fewest miles, and the same road the other way. Each shows its distance and its roads under Which way did you go?; tick the one you drove and press OK. OK is a plain button when the route ticked is the one already recorded, and turns amber when you have picked a different one. Cancel keeps the figure you had.
The first time, Muster asks before it measures, and says where your positions would go - on the station's own map server they go no further than the station's own network. Measure journeys by road, under Journeys and mileage in Settings › Features, stops it at any time. A figure you typed yourself is never measured over.
Flights, taxis, trains and ferries are never measured by road.
Recording a drive as you go
On Today, with GPS on, the Journey card records a drive as it happens: Start journey records where you set off and puts your clock on Travel, Add a stop marks each place on the way, and End journey records where you arrive and saves the journey. It then asks what happens next: Carry on working, Finish for the day, or Keep the clock as it is. The drive is time, counted as Travel. Recording time has the detail.
Pressing Clock out while the card is still recording asks whether the journey ended here: End the journey here saves it with the clock-out, and Keep recording - I'm still driving leaves the card running until you press End journey. Nothing is saved as a journey unless you say so.
A drive clocked on Travel with the ordinary Clock in and Clock out can become a journey too. At clock-out Muster asks Add this drive to your mileage? when the two ends are far enough apart, the Journey card is not recording one, and no journey that day already joins them. It is not asked after a day that crossed time zones: that was a flight, not a drive. An entry opened later offers Add this drive to your mileage under Miles.
A place you have driven to before keeps the name it already has, so four drives to one site are not filed under four postcodes.
When a journey cannot be saved, it is said plainly rather than swallowed:
- No signal: the drive is kept on the phone, and the card's button reads Save journey. Press it again when you have a signal.
- No position: nothing to measure from. Add the journey on Journeys.
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