It’s about that time rideshare drivers. Uncle Sam has come to take his money.
Rideshare drivers can lessen the financial strain of taxes dramatically by tracking and reporting their mileage, however, what do you do if you forgot to log your miles for a day, a week, or even months?
First of all, don’t panic.
Uber, Lyft, Via, Juno, or whatever TNC that you’re driving with likely has kept detailed records of your driving miles and will send you that either monthly or every year. BUT if you are relying on these stats is then you don’t get a full picture of how much you actually drove.
For example, Uber doesn’t track the miles that you drive to go pick up a passenger, which could easily add up to 10+ miles in a given session. Lyft, on the other hand, does not track the miles that you drive when you are heading to your work area. So if you’re driving from Baltimore to D.C. to work, you could be missing out on 40+ miles every time you drive.
So how do you track and deduct those miles?
The IRS will accept “supporting evidence that is sufficient to establish the element” as evidence that you drove the number of miles that you did, and there are few ways that you can create that supporting evidence.
First, let’s be clear what pieces that you need to figure out.
As a rideshare driver, there are 5 points in which you can track and deduct miles as we stated in our article, “This is how much not tracking your miles is costing you“.
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- When you are logged out and positioning yourself for a ride
- When you are logged in and waiting for a ride request
- When you are driving to pickup a passenger
- When you are driving a passenger
- After you drop off a passenger and logout again to position for a ride.
Every TNC will give you your mileage that you drive with a passenger, however, Uber will not give you your miles that you drive when positioning for a ride, waiting for a ride request, driving to pick up a passenger, or repositioning yourself after a ride.
Lyft will not give you your mileage for when you are logged out and positioning yourself or repositioning yourself for a ride like when you may move to an airport or a nearby city so you can have a better chance of finding a ride.
Estimate the number of miles you drive to get to your work area
Let’s tackle point #1 first as this could be a huge chunk of miles if you are coming from a suburb or another city to drive in a big city. Luckily, this can be pretty straightforward.
We just need to create an average distance that we drive each day to get to the area that you work. If you still drive in that area, you can simply turn on your mileage tracker and track your miles while driving to your usual location where you start working.
From there, estimate how many times a week that you drive to that spot and simply multiply to estimate how many miles you drive to get to your work area a week, and then again by the number of weeks in the year you have been working that spot.
It’s likely that you experimented with different work areas, so you’ll have to think and estimate this for each work area.
Estimate miles between pickups
Next, let’s look at how we can estimate how many miles you are driving with your app on between rides.
We’re again going to create a baseline based on current performance. To do this, pay attention to your mileage tracker right after you drop off a passenger and right before you pick one up.
When you drop off a passenger immediately take a screenshot of your current tracked miles, then, when you pick up your next passenger, take another screenshot of your current tracked miles. Continue to do this for about three sessions so that you can establish an average.
Also, start to track how many trips that you accept an hour, a day, and on a given shift. If you are a Gridwise user, you’ll already see these numbers.
Ideally, you’ll start to understand that you drive a certain number of miles on average to pick up a driver and that on an average day, you accept a certain number of trips. So if we drive 2 miles to pick up a rider and do 10 trips a session and 2 sessions a day, we just multiply to find that we drive about 40 miles per day to just pick up passengers.
We can then extrapolate this based on how many times a week/month/year we are doing full shifts or half shifts.
Compare average miles Uber tracks, vs average miles Gridwise tracks
Another great way to estimate your total miles is to build under stand the raito between the miles you drive while driving a passenger and the total miles you drive while on a shift.
You can do this by separately tracking how many miles that you drive with a passenger vs how many miles you drove in total across 10 or so sessions. The number of miles that you drive with a passenger is the number of miles that Uber would give you at year end.
Now I understand how Uber would track my mileage, and I understand my true mileage. So if I divide my true mileage by my Uber mileage or “on-trip” mileage, I will get a ratio that I can use to estimate how many more miles I should have tracked.
For example, if I track 120 on-trip miles and 150 total miles, then I can divide 150/120 and get 1.25 ratio. That means I should multiply the miles that Uber sends me in my year-end reports by 25% to get a a average.
I would suggest combining this method with the previous two methods discussed and using them all to corroborate each other.
Stay out of this sticky situation
When combined, the methods listed above will do a nice job of estimating your additional mileage, but the very best way to come up with a mileage number come tax season is to know for sure by tracking your miles.
Use Gridwise’s 100% free performance tracking feature to track your miles per trip, per session, trips per hour, earnings per trip and much more.
Oh and for all of you Gridwisers that were tracking your miles in 2017, check your inbox for your mileage tracking report! The subject line will be “Your 2017 Mileage Tax Report”
It will look something like this…
*Deduction estimates are based on the 2017 standard mileage rate of 53.5 cents per mile. Gridwise does not provide tax, legal, or accounting advice. This report has been prepared for informational purposes only. Gridwise is not responsible for the accuracy of the mileage recorded by the user or the resulting deduction estimates. You should consult your own tax or accounting professional.
