How to manage your taxi business for free

The usual way to avoid software fees is a notebook and a spreadsheet. It has no invoice attached, which makes it look free, and for a while it is.

What it costs shows up elsewhere. An evening a week reconstructing what happened. Fares that never made it onto a slip and are simply gone. Platform payouts that cannot be checked against what you recorded because you did not record it by channel. A quarter-end where the accountant's questions take longer to answer than the work took to do.

The point is not that spreadsheets are bad. It is that the comparison is not "free versus €20 a month" — it is "free versus free", once a genuinely free option exists.

Tomcabs is €0 per month for a company with one person and one active taxi. There is no expiry, no trial countdown and no card at signup. If you drive your own car and nobody else works in your workspace, that is the permanent price.

The threshold is deliberate rather than arbitrary. A solo owner-driver has no driver balances to settle and no team to coordinate, so the parts of Tomcabs that justify a subscription for a fleet do not apply to them — but the record keeping still does, and that is the part they were going without.

Two actions end it, both of them yours: adding a second person to the workspace, or activating a second taxi. Neither happens by accident, and neither triggers a charge — the action is blocked and the relevant plan is shown.

Open a shift from your phone against your taxi, entering the kilometer index. Encode each race as you finish it with the amount and how it was paid — cash, card, Bolt, Uber or invoice. Log fuel, a wash or a parking charge as an expense when it happens. Close the shift with the final index.

That is the whole obligation, and it happens in the moments you are already stopped. Nothing is left to be reconstructed at the end of the week, which is the actual saving — not the licence fee.

Out of it come road sheets assembled per date, kilometers per period, revenue split by channel, and expenses set against that revenue, all exportable when your accountant or a regional authority asks.

The number that matters to an owner-driver is not gross fares. It is what remains after platform commission, fuel, the wash, the parking, and the standing costs of the vehicle.

Recording the payment channel on every race makes the first part visible: at the same nominal fare, a platform journey returns less than a cash one, and knowing by how much across a real week tells you whether a source of work is worth taking.

Over a quarter, logged expenses turn "the car costs something" into a figure. That figure is the input to the only decisions a solo operator actually gets to make — which work to accept, and when to change the car. Getting it for nothing is the argument for doing it at all.