A busy week and nothing extra in the bank is how gig drivers lose money — the app showed a big gross number, and the gas, the tires, and the miles you drove for free between orders quietly ate it. This workbook is for the money side of driving: knowing what a mile really costs, seeing what each shift actually kept, and keeping the mileage log that turns into what’s usually your biggest tax deduction.
One connected file, the whole money picture. Set what a mile costs your car once, log each shift as you drive, and it shows your true dollars per hour, tracks every business mile for the standard mileage deduction, and sorts your expenses for tax time. It turns a week of app screenshots and a glovebox of receipts into the few numbers you can actually steer by.
What’s inside:
- ✦ A Cost Per Mile setup — gas (from your price and real MPG), maintenance, and the depreciation most drivers forget become your operating cost per mile. Right beside it sits the year’s IRS standard mileage rate for your taxes. Two numbers, two jobs, kept straight for you.
- ✦ A Shift Log — one row per shift: the app, your hours, your pay split into base, tips, and promotions, and your miles. It applies your cost per mile to every mile you drove online and shows the shift’s real net profit and your net dollars per hour — the number the apps never show.
- ✦ A Mileage & Deduction log — your shift miles roll in automatically; add any other business trips, note your odometer, and it shows the standard mileage deduction you’ve earned. The audit-ready record the IRS wants, built as you drive.
- ✦ An Expenses log — a Schedule-C tracker for the costs outside the car, with every category flagged for how it’s treated: it stacks on top of your mileage deduction (tolls, parking, phone, supplies), is already inside the rate (gas, maintenance), or is a gray area to confirm with your preparer (car washes) — so you claim what you can and don’t double-count what you can’t.
- ✦ A Dashboard — it ranks every app you drive on net dollars per hour, not the gross they advertise, and rolls up your tax-time totals: business miles, mileage deduction, and deductible expenses, live from your logs.
- ✦ A Start Here guide + three more PDFs — building your cost per mile and reading your real hourly, how the standard mileage deduction works and why drivers lose it, which expenses stack on it, and an easy tax time — plus printable shift, mileage, and expense logs for the car.
The working part really works: the workbook has six tabs of live formulas — type your numbers and your net dollars per hour, your mileage deduction, your expense totals, and the per-platform ranking compute for you. Use the .xlsx in Excel or LibreOffice Calc, or open the included one-click link and click Make a copy for a ready-made native Google Sheets version in your Drive — no importing, nothing to rebuild.
Built for gig drivers — rideshare drivers on Uber and Lyft, delivery drivers on DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub, shoppers and couriers on Instacart, and anyone running several apps at once who wants their real numbers in a spreadsheet they own.
Own it, don’t rent it. A one-time purchase you keep and reuse every week — the structured workbook that sits between a blank spreadsheet and a rented monthly mileage app. No subscription. And when the side hustle grows into a small operation, it graduates to Ardent Seller — your work, costs, and earnings across the whole operation, with a free plan to start.
Try it free first: the Gig-Driver Hourly Calculator — enter one shift’s earnings, hours, and miles to get your true dollars per hour, free and ungated.
Evergreen — use it any year: the method and the math are timeless, and the logs use date columns you fill in yourself.
A business and tax-record reference, not licensed advice. Every figure in the examples is illustrative; the IRS standard mileage rate changes every year, so you enter the current one for your tax year. This is not licensed tax, accounting, or legal advice — which deduction method wins for your car, and your state and local rules, are yours to verify, and a tax professional is worth it. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, the IRS, or any platform.
