End of Shift, and You Have No Idea If You Made Money Today
Cash fares in the pocket. Card payments hitting the account in three days. An airport run that paid well but burned half a tank getting there. Radio rental due Friday. Tyre replacement last week. The fuel receipt crumpled in the cup holder. A self-employed taxi driver handles more daily financial transactions than most small business owners, and most of them run it entirely from memory until the tax return is due.
Income Side: Five Revenue Streams, One Takings Field
The Income Type field classifies every fare into Cash, Card, Account, Airport, or Other. That distinction matters at tax time and it matters for daily cash flow. Cash is immediate. Card payments arrive with a processor delay and a transaction fee. Account work bills monthly to corporate clients. Airport fares are high-value but infrequent. Filtering by income type over a month shows which revenue streams are actually carrying the business and which ones cost more in dead miles than they return in fares.
The Reference number field ties each entry to a booking or receipt number from the dispatch system. When an account customer disputes a fare, that reference number is your evidence.
Expense Side: Where the Money Actually Goes
Seven expense categories: Fuel, Car Hire/Rental, Radio Rental/Hire, Repairs/Maintenance, Tyres, Motor Consumables, Car Wash. Every one of them is tax-deductible for a self-employed driver, and every one of them needs receipts and records.
Fuel is the big one. Logging fuel expenses by date against daily takings reveals your true cost-per-mile and your real profit margin. A driver doing 200 miles a day in a diesel that gets 45 MPG has fundamentally different economics than one doing 150 miles in a petrol hybrid. The Supplier field tracks which filling station you're using — because the 5p per litre difference between the supermarket pump and the branded station compounds into hundreds of pounds per year.
Payment Type on expenses — Cash, Credit/Debit Card, Bank — matters for reconciliation. Cash expenses need receipts. Card expenses show on statements. Bank transfers are for recurring costs like radio rental and hire agreements.
Net Takings: The Number That Actually Matters
The calculated Net takings field subtracts total expenses from total income for each entry. When you aggregate this across a week or a month using Memento's summary features, you see the real number — not the gross you collected, but the net after fuel, rental, maintenance, and consumables. That's the number you live on, and that's the number HMRC wants to see on your self-assessment.