Three things, at the end of every shift, in about two minutes: the business miles you drove, the money the shift produced, and a photograph of anything you bought. Do those and your Self Assessment in January is an export. Skip them and January becomes a reconstruction — and the mileage part of that reconstruction is not merely tedious, it is impossible, because the distance you covered last March exists only if something recorded it while you were covering it.
What do you need to record at the end of an Uber Eats shift?
Miles, money, receipts — in that order, because that is the order of how hard they are to recover. The miles are gone the moment you forget them. The money can be pieced back together from statements with effort. The receipts survive in a pocket for a while and then fade, since most till receipts are printed on thermal paper that goes blank in a warm car.
The unit that matters is the shift, not the week. A shift is still in your head when you park; a week is four shifts blended into an average. Every hour you leave between the driving and the recording costs you detail, and detail is exactly what a tax record is made of.
Why is the mileage log the part you cannot reconstruct?
Because there is no source to reconstruct it from. No delivery platform records your driving as a distance you can claim — it sees the jobs it gave you, not the drive from home to the zone, not the repositioning between orders, not the leg from a drop-off across town to the next pickup, and certainly not a second app’s work interleaved with its own. Your odometer knows the total for the year and nothing about which part of it was business.
What HMRC expects behind a mileage claim is a per-trip record: date, distance, the journey’s endpoints and its business purpose. A year-end figure with nothing underneath it answers none of those. And reconstructions have a recognisable texture — round distances, identical repeated trips, no personal journeys at all — which is precisely the texture that invites a closer look.
This is the strongest case for automatic capture. The log is the only record whose value collapses with time, so it is the one worth removing human memory from entirely. The audit-survival guide elsewhere on this blog covers what the finished log needs to contain.
What counts as the money side of the record?
Everything the work produced and everything the platform took before it reached you — because the figure you declare and the figure that landed in your bank are usually not the same number. Most delivery platforms show couriers a summary and separately provide a statement or self-billed invoice, and the two can present the work differently: one may show a net payout, the other a gross figure with fees itemised. Work from your own statements rather than from the in-app headline, and if the two do not reconcile, that is a question for the platform, asked now rather than in January.
Record per shift: the gross amount the jobs earned, any fee or commission deducted, tips, and any promotion or incentive payment. Tips paid in cash exist nowhere but your memory, so they get recorded or they are lost. The fee matters as much as the earnings — money withheld before payout is the easiest expense in the world to forget, because you never watched it leave.
Which shifts land in which tax return?
The UK tax year runs 6 April to 5 April, so the boundary falls mid-week and mid-shift-pattern rather than neatly at a month end. That alone catches people out who have mentally filed their year as January to December. A shift on 3 April and a shift on 8 April belong to different returns, are declared on different SA103S pages, and are paid for on different 31 January deadlines.
Which side a given payout falls on depends on your accounting basis. Sole traders now generally use the cash basis by default, where income counts when it is received and expenses when they are paid, with accruals available where it suits the business. Under the cash basis the payment date decides, so the shift worked at the start of April and paid a week later can land in the following year. Under accruals the work date decides. Pick one, record both dates on the payout, and the boundary is settled by a rule rather than by a guess.
The same care applies to expenses around the boundary — a tyre bought on 4 April and paid for on 7 April, an insurance premium spanning both years. Note the date you paid, and let the basis do the sorting.
What should you capture beyond the car?
The recurring small costs, because they are individually forgettable and collectively substantial. The business share of your phone and data, with a note of how you arrived at the share. The insurance the work requires — private cover generally does not extend to paid delivery, so hire and reward or a delivery policy is part of the cost of trading. The bag, the mount, the charger, the replacement cable. Parking and any clean-air or congestion charge incurred on a business journey, which sit outside the flat mileage rate and are claimed separately.
Photograph each receipt at the till and attach it to a record that says what it was for, while the answer is still obvious. A camera roll full of undated photographs of paper is the same problem as a shoebox, moved to a phone.
What does the routine actually look like?
Park, stay in the seat, and do this before you go inside:
The whole thing is designed to survive a bad day. A shift where you only clear the trip queue and type one earnings figure still keeps the system alive — and a system that is alive in November is the reason January takes an afternoon.
- Clear the trip queue: business or personal, one decision per trip, while you still remember which stop was which
- Enter what the shift earned, including tips, and the fee if the statement shows one
- Photograph any receipt from the shift and say in two words what it was for
- Add manually any drive the tracker missed — the phone left at home, the borrowed car
- Once a week, export the lot to your own storage, so the records outlive any single app or account
What happens when you add a second app?
Nothing changes about the records, which is the point of keeping your own. Several platforms are not several businesses; they are one self-employment with several customers, filed on one set of self-employment pages. What does change is how badly per-app summaries serve you: the driving that connects one platform’s drop-off to another’s pickup is business mileage that neither platform can see, and it only exists in a log that spans both.
That cross-platform view is also the only way to answer the question that actually pays you — what an hour on each app is worth once the unpaid driving between jobs is counted. The effective-hourly-rate post on this blog does that arithmetic; it needs miles and money recorded against the same shifts, which is what the two minutes above produce.
BrewGig is an independent product and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or partnered with Uber Eats or any delivery platform; all platform names are the trade marks of their respective owners, used here only to describe how the work functions.