Mileage logs for rideshare and delivery drivers

What the platform doesn't count

Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart and Grubhub all report the same thing: the trips they dispatched to you. That is a genuine record, but it is a record of their business, not yours. A normal shift contains a lot of driving that never appears in it:

• The drive from home to wherever you actually start working.
• Repositioning between requests — circling, moving to a busier area, driving back from a drop-off in the wrong direction.
• Waiting time spent moving rather than parked.
• The drive home at the end of the shift.
• Anything you drove while the app was open but no order was active.

Depending on how you drive, that can be a substantial share of the distance the vehicle covered. Rules on which of those miles qualify differ by country and by your circumstances — the point is that you cannot claim what you never recorded, and the platform summary alone will not have recorded it.

Multi-apping breaks per-platform logs

If you run Uber and Lyft at once, or DoorDash alongside Instacart, per-platform mileage reports stop making sense. The same mile gets claimed by one app, ignored by another, and double counted if you add the summaries together. Reconciling them at the end of the year is not a good use of an evening.

The fix is to stop logging per platform and start logging per shift. You drove one car, on one continuous stretch of road, for work. One reading when you pull away and one when you finish captures all of it exactly once, whoever dispatched what in the middle.

The two-number shift log

This is the whole workflow, and it is why Odometer does not try to detect anything automatically:

• Before you pull away — open Odometer, enter the odometer reading as the start.
• When you finish — enter the reading as the end. The distance calculates itself.
• Tap business, and put the platforms and the area you worked in the note.
• Fuel up on the way home? Log it as an expense against the same vehicle, with the volume and the odometer reading.

One line per shift, accurate to the vehicle's own instrument, entered in the ten seconds you were sitting in the car anyway. Forty guessed entries reconstructed in April is the alternative, and it is worse in every way that matters.

Track costs at the same time

High-mileage drivers often have a real decision to make between claiming a flat per-mile rate and claiming the business share of what the vehicle actually cost. You cannot compare those two without a year of both numbers.

Odometer keeps expenses next to the trips, under fuel, tolls, parking, maintenance, car wash or other, on the same vehicle. When you export, the CSV carries both and the PDF works the deduction at whatever rate you set, so the comparison is a spreadsheet away rather than a year of missing data away.

Keep your own copy

One more reason not to lean on the platform's summary: it lives in an account you do not control. Deactivations happen, apps change what they expose, and a year-end report you can no longer download is not a record.

Odometer's data sits on your phone, and the export is a plain CSV or PDF you file wherever you keep the rest of the year's paperwork. Nobody can withdraw your access to it — which also means nobody can restore it for you, so export before you change phones.