FareMeter How to track your taxi earnings and expenses per shift
Net earnings are the fares you took minus whatever the shift actually cost you: fuel, tolls, parking, commission, the rest. A shift that looks good on paper can turn out barely worth driving once fuel is out, which is easy to miss without tracking expenses. Pro groups your trips into shifts, logs expenses with a photo of the receipt, and shows gross, expenses, net, cash and card for each shift and each period.
Why gross fares are not what you earned
A night that pulled in 200 in fares looks great right up until 60 of fuel and a 20 parking ticket come off it. Track expenses against the fares, shift by shift, and you actually see which hours and which days pay — not which ones just felt busy.
Start and end a shift
- Open the Work tab and tap Shifts.
- Tap Start a shift. With Pro, tapping START on the meter when no shift is open also starts one for you.
- Drive as usual. Every trip you save goes into the open shift.
- At the end, tap End shift. The shift moves to the history with its totals.
Log expenses
- Go to Work and tap Expenses, then Add expense. You can also tap Add Expense on a shift.
- Pick a Category: Fuel, Maintenance, Tolls, Cleaning, Insurance, Commission, Parking or Other.
- Enter the amount, the Date and a note if you like, and attach a Receipt photo.
- Leave Attach to current shift on to count it against tonight's net, then tap Save.
Worked example: one evening shift
Five trips over 4 hours 30 minutes of active time, paid partly in cash and partly by card, with two expenses. EUR.
| Trip | Fare | Paid by |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 15.20 | Cash |
| 2 | 21.70 | Card |
| 3 | 19.75 | Card |
| 4 | 4.00 | Cash |
| 5 | 13.20 | Cash |
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Gross (sum of fares) | 73.85 |
| Cash | 32.40 |
| Card / other | 41.45 |
| Expenses: Fuel 28.00 + Parking 3.50 | 31.50 |
| Net (gross − expenses) | 42.35 |
| Earnings rate (gross ÷ 4.5 h) | 16.41 per hour, shown rounded as 16/h |
That Earnings rate figure uses gross fares, which flatters things. Your real net per hour on this shift is 42.35 ÷ 4.5 = 9.41 — that is the number worth checking before deciding whether a late shift is worth staying out for.
Look at a whole week or month
- Open the Earnings tab.
- Pick Week, Month, Year or All at the top.
- Read Gross, Expenses and Net in the first card, then the PAYMENT SPLIT of cash against card or app payments.
- Scroll for earnings per hour and per km or mile, average fare, earnings by day and by weekday, and a breakdown by shift and by expense category.
Anything not marked as cash counts on the card side: card, a payment app or a payment link.
What is free and what needs Pro
The Earnings tab and its charts run in the free version off your saved trips alone. Shifts and expenses are Pro only — without it, the Expenses figure sits at zero and Net just equals Gross, which is worth knowing before you wonder why your numbers look too clean.
A few ways to shoot yourself in the foot here
- Forgetting to end the shift, so tomorrow's trips quietly land on the same one.
- Dropping a whole week of fuel into one shift, which makes that single night look like a loss. Turn off Attach to current shift for costs that belong to the week, not the day.
- Leaving trips on the wrong payment method — it skews the cash figure you actually need to hand in or bank, which shows up fast at a cash count.
Questions and answers
How do I work out taxi driver earnings per hour?
Which taxi driver expenses can I log?
Can I add expenses outside a shift?
Are shifts in the free version?
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More FareMeter guides
- How a taxi fare is calculated, and how FareMeter's GPS meter does it
- What time do taxi rates change? Setting up day, night and weekend tariffs
- How to charge for waiting time and extras like luggage, airport and tolls
- How to give a passenger a proper taxi receipt from your iPhone
- Taxi driver record keeping: exporting trips and expenses to CSV
- Is there an Apple Watch taxi app that works as a fare meter?
- All questions about FareMeter
- Back to FareMeter