Three ways to keep a driver's numbers, compared point by point, with their strengths and their limits, without exaggeration.
The paper sheet has served generations of drivers: it costs nothing, it never breaks down and it works without a battery. The Excel spreadsheet, for its part, is a powerful and flexible tool: a driver who is comfortable with formulas can build a very respectable tracking system in it, including tax calculations. Neither one is ridiculous, and this page puts down neither of them, nor any competing product, which it does not name.
The real question is elsewhere: how much time and how many steps does each method take, every day, to reach the same result, and what does it cover beyond the numbers? That is what the table below compares, fact by fact.
| Criterion | Paper sheet | Excel spreadsheet | Taxi-Flow |
|---|---|---|---|
| Daily entry time | Writing by hand at the end of each day, then copying or filing the sheets at the end of the month. | Typing on a keyboard, often in the evening at home, in a file to open, save and back up. | Entry directly in the phone, on the spot, with ready made categories for income and expenses. |
| GST and QST tax calculation | Calculation by hand or with a calculator, to be redone each period, with the risk of error that comes with it. | Possible and reliable if you build the right formulas yourself with the rates of 5% and 9.975%, and if you maintain them. | GST and QST calculated automatically on expenses, with tax totals payable in the reports. |
| Reports by period | To compile yourself by adding up the sheets for the day, the month, 3 months or the year. | Possible with formulas and tables to build and adjust yourself for each period. | Built in reports for the day, the month, 3 months and the year: income, expenses, net balance and detail by category. |
| Documents and receipts | Binders and envelopes of paper receipts, to search physically at the moment you need them. | The spreadsheet records the amounts, but the documents themselves stay in separate files or folders. | Driver Documents in the app, automatic OCR reading of documents and invoices, expenses created from a scan and expiry alerts. |
| Safety inspection round | Paper checklist to tick, date and keep yourself to preserve a record. | A checklist can be improvised, but with no built in guide or structured history by default. | Guided round of about 20 points, minor and major defects, history with a calendar and PDF export. |
| Joint accident report | Paper form to fill out on the spot, often under stress, if you have a copy on board. | Not suited to the side of the road: the spreadsheet does not guide the process at the moment of the accident. | Step by step guide in the phone: 911 emergency, GPS location, photos, sketch drawn in the app, signatures and official PDF. |
| Working without Internet | Perfect on this point: paper needs neither a network nor a battery. | The local file works offline on the computer, but entry rarely happens from the vehicle. | Designed offline first: entry and rounds without a network, automatic sync when the connection returns. |
| Exports for the accountant | Photocopies or sheets to hand over in person, which the accountant will often have to enter again. | The file can be shared as is, as long as it is well structured and up to date. | Structured Excel export and accountant-ready PDF report generated from data that is already sorted. |
How to read this table: Excel can do a lot when you take the time to build the file. Taxi-Flow starts from the idea that the driver would rather spend that time elsewhere.
If your paper sheet or your Excel file suits you and stays up to date, keep them: what matters is having complete and verifiable numbers. Taxi-Flow is for drivers who want the same result with fewer steps, plus the parts that neither paper nor a spreadsheet covers on its own: scanned documents, a guided round, the accident report in the phone. To judge for yourself, discover all of Taxi-Flow's features, see how the tool fits taxi drivers, paratransit and Uber and rideshare drivers, then compare the pricing.
Free 14 day trial, no credit card, no automatic conversion. The subscription includes 5 invoice scans a day and 20 document scans a month, with unlimited accident reports and safety rounds.
Taxi-Flow