Driver balances and weekly settlements

At the end of a week, one number matters per driver: does this person owe the company, or does the company owe this person? Everything else is input to that.

Answering it by hand means gathering the week's races, separating cash from card from platform revenue, applying whatever the arrangement with that driver is, subtracting expenses they paid out of pocket, and comparing against cash already handed in. Done for six drivers, on paper, that is most of a Sunday.

Worse, it is done from incomplete data. Any race that never made it onto a slip is simply absent, and neither party can tell later whether it happened.

The inputs are already in the system by the time the week ends. Races carry an amount and a payment method. Shifts carry expenses. The driver's commission arrangement is configured on their profile.

From that, Tomcabs derives the settlement: total revenue generated, split by channel; the company's and driver's shares under the arrangement; expenses the driver incurred; and cash the driver is physically holding. The balance is what remains once those are netted against each other.

Because the computation runs off records rather than recollection, it is also reproducible. The same week recalculated next month gives the same answer, which is not true of a number someone worked out on the back of an envelope.

The most common error in a hand-kept driver balance is treating all revenue as equivalent. It is not. A €30 cash fare means the driver is holding €30 of the company's money. A €30 Bolt fare means the platform will pay the company, net of commission, in due course, and the driver is holding nothing.

Add those together and the balance is wrong by the entire cash component. Do it every week and the error compounds into a figure neither party can reconstruct or trust.

Tomcabs keeps the channels distinct end to end, which is the structural reason the balances come out right rather than approximately right.

A balance that is correct but opaque still produces arguments. Drivers dispute figures they cannot see the derivation of, and they are right to.

In Tomcabs the driver sees their own shifts, their own races, and their own expenses from their phone throughout the week. When the settlement appears, it is built from records they already have visibility on, so the conversation is about a line they disagree with rather than about the total.

That transparency is the practical reason to move balances off spreadsheets, ahead of the time saving. It removes an entire category of weekly friction between a company and the people driving for it.