Leased Driver or Employed Driver: The Log Adapts
The key architectural difference in this version of the cab driving log is that Gross Revenue is the manual input, and Net Revenue is the calculated output—Gross Revenue minus Lease Expense minus Fuel Expense. For a driver working a standard daily lease arrangement, gross goes in at the top of the revenue chain and the deductions come off below it. For an employed driver with a guaranteed base and commission structure, the same fields apply with different values: Gross Revenue reflects total metered revenue, and Lease Expense may represent a company-defined deduction rather than a full lease payment.
The template's description explicitly notes compatibility with both models, and that flexibility is in the calculation direction. Enter what you know at the gross level; the system computes what you keep.
The Hourly Wage That Changes Everything
Taxi driving is sold to new operators as a business where hard work equals good money. That relationship exists, but it is mediated by expenses, inefficiency, and time. The Hourly Wages calculation—Take-Home Revenue divided by Hours—is the number that tests the proposition against the actual shift.
A driver who works a twelve-hour split shift and grosses $280 feels like they had a reasonable day. After fuel ($45), lease ($130), and dispatch tip ($22), take-home is $83 on 12 hours—$6.92 per hour. That is below minimum wage in most U.S. markets. The calculation is not a comfortable outcome to see on a Tuesday afternoon. It is, however, the one that prompts the question of whether the evening portion of a split shift, which typically generates lower-efficiency airport and suburb runs in lower-demand hours, is worth the additional lease expense it accrues.
Revenue to Miles: Reading the Quality of the Book
Revenue to Miles is Net Revenue divided by Miles Driven. It is the metric that distinguishes a productive routing strategy from a mileage-generating one. A driver who stays in a dense urban zone with high trip frequency, short distances, and consistent flagging revenue runs a very different Revenue to Miles figure than a driver who chases longer fares to airports or suburbs—trips that feel larger individually but burn more fuel, accumulate more deadhead return miles, and often produce a lower per-mile return.
The MPG figure sits alongside Revenue to Miles for a reason: fuel consumption and route efficiency interact. A route with poor Revenue to Miles that also runs low MPG—because of highway driving into suburbs and back—is doubly inefficient. Both metrics in the same record, for the same shift, make that interaction visible.
Cab Number is the fleet-level variable. If the same driver runs different vehicles on different days and logs each one by number, the per-vehicle performance data accumulates. A specific cab that consistently returns lower MPG figures across multiple drivers on multiple days has a mechanical problem, not a behavioral one. The record establishes which is which.