I have been driving doing rideshare and food delivery gigs for five years. And for much of those five years, I kept my mileages with an excel spreadsheet. 

I would simply create a new Excel file and label a sheet for the tax year. Each time I drive for one of the brands, I’d write down the mileage when I turn the rideshare or food delivery app and write the miles the moment I get home. If pen and paper weren’t available, I would take a photo of my odometer at the start and the end of a trip. Then I enter that into the Excel spreadsheet. 

This manual method worked well for one reason. I was only using my Prius for rideshare and food delivery. Rarely did I use it for personal reasons, and so the miles were easy to track. But then things got very cumbersome around 2017. During the Coronavirus pandemic, I switched to using an app to track my miles.

Here are the reasons why I stopped using spreadsheets to track my rideshare and food delivery mileages.

Separating the Miles for Brands

I had to separate which miles were for rideshare and which were for food delivery. This separation wasn’t so bad at the beginning because, in the mornings, I’d do rideshare. Then noon, I’d do lunch food deliveries. Then afternoon rideshare. At dinner time, I deliver food. Simple. I can keep track of the mileages like this. 

But I have to identify which miles were for which platform whenever I used Turbo Tax to file for my tax returns. I need to accurately report which rideshare miles belonged to Lyft and which were associated with Uber. For accuracy, this is very tidiest to keep records since I drive for both platforms simultaneously. Separating by brands made it more work to keep records manually. Often, I would put off entering my miles into the spreadsheet. And later, I would have to go through a bunch of odometer photos and try to figure out, based on the timestamp of the photos I took, which platform each image was for.

For example, a 2:15 PM photo would likely be for food delivery since I work food delivery from 11 AM to 2 PM. But which platform was it for? This question is easy to answer if I only drive for one food delivery platform, but I don’t. 

As a result, when tax season came, I couldn’t provide accurate mileage logs associated with each platform. My mileage counts were valid, but I couldn’t provide details on how many miles were for Uber and Lyft, respectively, among the rideshare miles. And the same with the food delivery with Caviar, Postmates, etc. 

More Personal Usage of Car

Another thing that changed is that I started using my Prius for personal usage more in 2018. And each time, I had to track those miles too. It became a hassle. It would be nice to see friends and not have to take note of your starting and ending miles. Record keeping my miles became a chore due to the personal use of my car.

Worries About Being Audited By IRS

I took a year off to travel in 2019 before the Corona Virus hit. While overseas, I received a letter from the IRS about my 2018 tax returns. When I found out about this letter, I was apprehensive about providing more details about mileages.

Because if they ask me to provide more details on my mileages, I would not have been able to. Luckily it wasn’t the about miles. But the experience made me feel less at ease about manually tracking my mileages. I’ve heard horror stories when the IRS goes after people. 

I Stack Many Platforms

For years, I stacked rideshare and food delivery apps. But when the Corona Virus hit the planet, rideshare platforms like Uber and Lyft went belly up in demand. So I had to make adjustments to maintain a stable income.

During the Pandemic, I added grocery delivery gigs with Instacart and Shipt. I then added scooter charging gigs with Lime. And I even explored Dolly and TaskRabbit.  

I have to keep track of mileage for each of these platforms. That’s too much work for me, to be honest. All the small business websites say that tracking your business miles as an independent contractor is easy. And it is. But when you’re stacking multiple platforms. It becomes a chore. 

Exploring Mileage Tracking Apps

Given the pain points, I listed above, automating my mileage record-keeping with a mobile app for tax purposes makes sense. I have been exploring adding a mileage tracking app to automate my mileage tracking. 

When I first started out driving in the gig economy, many of the mileage tracking apps were relatively new, and people didn’t feel comfortable providing their locations to tech companies. Myself included. 

But over the years, mileage tracking apps have become a lot more developed. And several accurate, easy to use, and high-quality applications are available. If you’re considering switching to using an app to keep track, I recently wrote about some of the ones that are leading the industry here:

The Digital Shift

We’re in a very transitional time right now with this Pandemic. Everything is experiencing a digital shift. How we order food, shop for goods, and pay for such goods and services is changing. Everything is going digital. Tracking our miles will be no different.

If you’re still keeping track of your miles using spreadsheets, I hope it doesn’t become a chore for you.

Keep it simple. Stay safe out there. 

Cheers.