What Records an Independent Driver Actually Needs to Keep

• Six records: earnings on every platform, business miles, business expenses, vehicle upkeep, the documents that let you drive, and your riders.
• The IRS asks a mileage log for four things per trip: date, destination, business purpose, miles.
• Keep supporting records for three years as a general rule, and car records for as long as you own it plus three.
• A platform keeps its own version. It records the passenger miles and the payouts. It records nothing else, and only while you still have the account.
• The mileage apps are good at four of the six. None of them holds the sixth.
• Five of these records tell you what last year was. One of them decides what next year is.

Not a filing cabinet. Six answers you should be able to give in under a minute.

Record	What it has to contain	Why it exists
Earnings, everywhere	Date, amount, platform, note	Your gross receipts are the sum of every platform plus your own riders, not one app's total
Business miles	Date, destination, business purpose, miles	Usually the largest deduction on a driver's return
Business expenses	Date, amount, category, business or personal, receipt	Phone, data, tolls, parking, car washes, seat covers, supplies
Vehicle upkeep	Date, cost, what was done, mileage at service	Cost per mile, the repair argument, and resale value
The paperwork	Licence, registration, insurance, inspection, local permit, renewal dates	A lapsed document stops the work, and nobody sends you a useful warning
Your riders	Who booked you, and who booked you again	The only one of the six that is about next year

The first four are the ones every driver has heard of. The fifth is the one that costs a week of work when it goes wrong. The sixth is the one almost nobody keeps, and it is the reason this page exists.

Worth being precise here, because drivers hear "keep a mileage log" and picture something more elaborate than what is being asked.

IRS Publication 463 asks for four things about every business trip: the date, the destination, the business purpose, and the miles driven. On top of that it asks for your odometer reading at the start and the end of the tax year.

Two details matter more than the four fields.

It has to be contemporaneous. Written at or near the time of the trip. Not reconstructed in March from a bank statement and a good memory. A weekly log counts as timely under Publication 463, so this is not a demand that you write something down at every red light. It is a demand that you not invent it later.

The format is genuinely up to you. A paper notebook in the door pocket, a spreadsheet, or the automatic record an app produced are all acceptable. What is not acceptable is a trip with three of the four fields.

That is the whole standard. This is general information rather than tax advice, and your own preparer is the person to ask about your situation.

The IRS general guidance for a self-employed taxpayer is three years for records supporting income, expenses, deductions and credits, running from the filing deadline or the date you actually filed, whichever is later.

Then the parts drivers get wrong:

• Business assets are kept for as long as you own them plus three years. For a driver that means the car. Purchase paperwork, finance agreement, the service history, the day it went into service.
• Six years if more than 25 percent of gross income was omitted from a return.
• Indefinitely if no return was filed for a year. There is no filing date, so no clock ever starts.

So the honest version of "three years" is that three years is the floor for the ordinary case, and the car outlives it. Ask your own preparer where the line falls for you.

Uber and Lyft do keep records. Their records, of their side of the arrangement.

A platform records the miles with a passenger in the car and the payouts it made you. It does not record the drive out to the airport queue, the reposition across town when a zone went quiet, or the deadhead home at two in the morning. Those are your business miles and the platform has no reason to count them, because they were never the platform's trip.

And then the part that is easy not to think about until it happens. Those records live behind an account. An account you no longer have access to is a record you can no longer download. The driver who kept their own copy loses nothing that week. The driver who did not is reconstructing a year from memory at exactly the worst moment.

Keeping your own copy is not distrust. It is the difference between a record and a permission.

This field is crowded and mostly honest about its job. Stride, Everlance, MileIQ and Hurdlr all exist to turn a year of driving into a deduction total, and they are good at it.

MileIQ is a pure mileage tracker with a swipe to sort business from personal, and it is very good at that one thing. Stride is free, takes a weekly earnings total you type in yourself, and produces a Schedule C PDF. Everlance and Hurdlr both do automatic mileage plus bank-linked expenses, with Hurdlr carrying one real Uber connection and inferring the rest from bank deposits.

Keep whichever one is already working for you. This is not a tool you rip out for another one, and SOLODRIVE.PRO runs alongside all of them.

But notice what the shape of that field tells you. Every product in it is built to answer one question at the end of the year: what do I owe. That is a real question and they answer it well. It is also a question about a year that has already happened.

Two of the six records are barely covered by the field at all. Vehicle upkeep sits half in a bank feed and half in a glovebox. And your riders appear nowhere, in any of them, because a rider who books you directly is not a platform event and there is nothing in a mileage tracker that has the concept.

SOLODRIVE.PRO has a Taxes and mileage tab in your operator console, and it is straight about where each number comes from.

Your other-platform earnings, logged by you. Date, amount, platform, note. Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart or other. You bring your own totals across from each app's own earnings screen. Nothing is read from your logins and nothing is inferred from your bank deposits, which is exactly why nothing can be switched off on you.

Your own rides count themselves. A ride booked and paid through your booking page is already recorded, and it deliberately cannot be entered by hand as well. Counting it twice would inflate your gross receipts.

Mileage. Rides taken through your booking page carry their own measured miles. Everything else you enter yourself, with the date, the miles, and whether the trip was business or personal.

Expenses. Date, amount, category, business or personal, a note, and a receipt image if you have one.

Vehicle upkeep. Oil, tires, brakes, registration and the rest of the running costs, logged in the same place as everything else. That log answers a resale question and a repair argument as well as a tax one, and it is the fastest way to notice a cost per mile that has been quietly climbing since spring.

A period selector. Full year, year to date, or any single quarter, with the summary recalculating against whatever you pick.

Straight about the tiers, because this is where software tends to go vague. Your entries and your running summaries are yours on every plan, including the free one. The mileage and expense summary as a CSV is part of Basic. The Schedule C worksheet, the quarterly estimate and the PDF export are part of Pro.

And the boundary that matters: this is an estimate, not a filing. SOLODRIVE.PRO does not file your taxes and does not give tax advice. The worksheet exists to be handed to your preparer.

Here is the one that is missing from every checklist, including the ones written by people who mean well.

You have driven thousands of people. A handful of them chose you on purpose, and a smaller handful chose you twice. Almost no driver can name them. There is no field for it in a mileage app, no line for it on a tax form, and no platform on earth is going to hand you the list, because on a platform a rider you drove forty times and a rider you have never met are the same object.

Your customer list on SOLODRIVE.PRO is a read-only list of the riders who have booked you directly. It makes the record exist at all, under your handle, on a page that belongs to you.

Now the arithmetic, counted in rides on your own calendar rather than in a number we measured. Run it against your own week.

What a regular books	Rides a week	Rides a year
One ride a week	1	52
Twice a week	2	104
Commute, both legs, two days	4	208
One leg, five days	5	260

Three riders booking you twice a week is 312 rides across a year that were agreed before the week started. Six of them is more than 600. Those are rides that never went out to a dispatch queue and never had to be won twice.

That is the difference between the five records and the sixth. A mileage log tells you what a year cost. A list of the people who came back tells you what the next one could be worth, and it is the only record here that compounds.

You can go further with the ones that come back. Mark a rider as a regular, they consent, their card is saved, and the recurring billing runs weekly from there. That is a Tuesday at six which is already income before Monday starts, and it records itself into the same year-to-date figures you are already keeping.

None of this needs software you do not have. It needs a slot in the week.

• Log the other-platform earnings while the week is still fresh. One entry per platform, from that app's own earnings screen. Five minutes.
• Write the miles the same day you drive them. Date, where, why, how many. A weekly log is timely. A March reconstruction is not.
• Photograph the receipt at the pump, not at the kitchen table. The receipt you did not photograph is the deduction you did not take.
• Log the service the day the car comes back. Cost, what was done, and the odometer reading at the time.
• Put every renewal date in one place. Licence, registration, insurance, inspection, local permit. Set the reminder for a month early, not a week.
• Read your rider list once a month. Ten minutes. Notice who has gone quiet and who has come back three times without you noticing.
• Keep the whole thing where you can still reach it if an account goes away. That is the entire point of a record you own.

Five of the six records answer a question about a year that is already finished. Keep them properly anyway, because the mileage number is usually the largest one on your return, the car outlives the three-year rule, and a lapsed document stops the work outright.

Then keep the sixth, which nobody asks you for. The riders who chose you on purpose are the only record in this list that is worth more next year than it was this year, and no platform, no earnings app and no mileage tracker is holding it for you.

Track earnings, stay tax-ready, log what the car costs. Then write down the people who came back, and give them somewhere to book you again.