Driving for a living — private hire, taxi, or delivery on Uber, Deliveroo, Just Eat and the rest — makes you self-employed, with your vehicle as your single biggest cost. Get the vehicle claim right and your tax bill drops a lot; get it wrong and you either overpay or invite questions. And since the apps now report your earnings to HMRC, the income side has to be spot on too.

We handle both. We work out whether mileage or actual running costs saves you more, claim fuel, insurance, servicing, phone and platform fees, reconcile your app income correctly, and file on time. Simple, fixed-fee, and built for how drivers actually earn.

Taxi driver bookkeeping

Bookkeeping for a taxi or private hire driver is really three habits, done weekly rather than in a January panic:

  • Record every fare. App earnings (Uber, Deliveroo, Just Eat and the rest) come with statements you can reconcile line by line; street jobs and account work have to be written down as they happen. Both are income, and both need declaring.
  • Keep a mileage log. Business miles are the foundation of your biggest claim, and the record has to exist before anyone asks for it — date, journey, miles. If actual running costs beat the mileage rate for your vehicle, keep the fuel, servicing, insurance and repair receipts instead.
  • Photograph every receipt. Fuel, car washes, licence and badge fees, radio or circuit fees, platform commission, phone, breakdown cover — captured at the pump or the counter, not hunted for months later.

Do that in FreeAgent — included in every one of our packages — and the bank feed does most of the work for you: transactions arrive ready to categorise, receipts attach to them, and your tax estimate updates as you drive. It's about fifteen minutes a week; our sole trader bookkeeping guide sets out the routine.

It matters more than it used to, as well. Making Tax Digital for Income Tax brings digital records and quarterly updates for sole traders over the income thresholds from April 2026 onwards, so a carrier bag of receipts stops being a workable system. And if your bookkeeping is already behind, we rebuild the year from your app statements and bank feed and get you current — a normal week for us, not a lecture.