How to Calculate and Verify Uber Earnings

Regardless of whether you own a fleet of Uber cars or you are a sole driver, you need to be able to track your revenue and run it against your costs to verify you are not a loss-making entity. And if you are, learn the best ways to cut down costs.

You are responsible for the success of your Uber business and can never blame the parent company for your loss-making unit.

After all, you are not an Uber employee. You are a partner!

How to Calculate Your Uber Earnings

Several parameters are essential for you to calculate your Uber Earnings. These are;

Start and End Locations – The start and end location will give you the total miles covered during the ride. Depending on your city, Uber has a per mile rate, and so your earnings will be calculated as a product of distance covered and rate per mile.

Duration of The Trip – Sometimes, especially during an Uber surge, you will be stuck in traffic. Again, depending on the city you offer your services, Uber will have a per minute rate. This is especially important when you are waiting for a customer.

You will multiply the number of minutes waited by the rate per minute.

Trip Distance – The longer the distance you are transporting the client, the more the money you will make. This doesn’t mean you cancel short-distance trips because if you do, your account will be deactivated.

Vehicle Type – The vehicle type determines which service of Uber you will signup for. UberX is a mid-tier service and thus charges less than the luxury services such as UberBlack and UberSUV.

The vehicle type also determines the amount of fuel a vehicle will consume. Remember that fuel is an expense and has the effect of reducing your earnings.

Base Fare – Base fare is the amount of money a customer must pay once he places a request for a ride. The customer must pay this amount no matter how short the distance covered.

From the above parameters, you can calculate your earnings as follows:

Base fare + (Distance *rate per mile) + (Wait time*rate per minute)

Of course, you will have to deduct the expenses of the trip such as fuel to see how much profit you’ve made.

How To Verify Your Uber Earnings

Use the Earnings Dashboard

The earnings dashboard gives you the overview of the money you have made including;

• Total Earnings for the Week – The data on the panel includes the trip fares and all other earnings such as promotions and incentives.
• Total Current Balance – This is the amount of money available to you. It will be deposited to your account.
• Trips Completed – You will also get the number of trips you completed during the week so that you can compare them with the fares that were charged for each trip.

Use the Weekly Earnings Dashboard

This dashboard displays your daily transactions. You can navigate to individual earnings per trip. Review the following earnings details;

• Daily Earnings – You can drill down to a particular trip to see the net earnings.
• Earnings Breakdown – Here, you can verify things like cancellation fees, tolls, fare charged during the trip and the boosts during a particular day.
• Trips Completed Per Day – This information helps you find out why on a particular day you completed fewer trips than others, and then devise how you can avoid delays that cost you money.

Educate Yourself on Cost Control

Read widely about how other transporters control their costs. You are likely to stumble on different aspects of managing your business that are useful for your Uber business.

Use Clever Apps to Control Your Expenses

You can, for example, get yourself a clever little gadget like GOFAR to monitor your car’s health and even your driving style. The affordable device can also take the hassle out of car servicing. So if you’re stuck on what to gift your husband on his special day, consider GOFAR.

The technology will find the best mechanics for you, get the sweet spot of your car’s engine to help you save fuel, and log your mileage for tax deduction purposes.

Use Uber App’s Transaction History

The app allows you to access a transaction history page that gives you per week earnings.

• Navigate to a Specific Week – You may want to know why one of your cars returned depressed earnings on a particular week. The app will give you detailed feedback so that you can avoid similar situations in the future.
• Graph Snapshots – If you are looking for a daily or a weekly snapshot of what happened during the week, the app has graphs that give you an overall picture. If the curve is on a downward trend, you will know that in that week, you made a loss.

Learn How to Calculate Your Uber Revenue

Uber revenue is calculated using the distance of miles covered and the time spent either waiting for the customer or actively transporting him to his destination.

Although Uber will provide you with the earnings reports as indicated in this article, it is your responsibility to establish the miles driven and time spent on the ride.

Just like you won’t pay a worker at your home without the knowledge of the actual work they did, so should you track your car(s) fueling, miles driven, wait time during the rides and time spent on actual trips.

Use Tools to Verify the Revenue

If you own a fleet, you will need tools installed on your car to track time spent on a ride, distance covered by the individual driver, and other expenses.

All ridesharing cars must always have a GPS tracker as well as a mileage tracker.

Review Data From Each Car’s Dash Panel

You are well advised to check the data from each of your cars’ dashboard. The data you will be looking out for include your car’s health and mileage.

This information will help you do a revenue validation on per car basis, i.e. compare the miles driven against the miles billed for each vehicle.