Rideshare and delivery driver advisory: know what a kilometre really costs

Advisory sized for a driver, not a boardroom

A full-time driver runs tens of thousands of dollars of revenue through a depreciating machine every year, which makes the core CFO questions — what an hour is worth, what a kilometre costs, when to add capacity — exactly the same as a fleet's, just smaller. So we size the engagement accordingly: a quarterly cadence at a fixed fee, built around three or four numbers instead of a board deck. There is also a new reason to get the numbers straight: under Canada's digital platform reporting rules, Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and the other platforms now report your gross earnings and identifiers to the CRA every year. Your gross is fully visible; the only thing still in your control is proving the costs that came out of it, on a properly built T2125.

Cost per kilometre: the truth table

Most drivers judge a week by payout minus gas, which overstates profit badly, because the two biggest costs are invisible week to week. The honest number is every cost of running the vehicle divided by total kilometres — including the empty kilometres between trips, which cost the same as paid ones and earn nothing:

Two habits make the number real: a kilometre log the CRA will accept — an automatic tracker beats memory — and a maintenance accrual, a per-kilometre amount set aside every week so the brake job is already funded when it lands. Once your cost per kilometre exists, every decision downstream gets easy to test, starting with which apps deserve your hours.

Multi-app strategy, measured

The unit that matters is the paid hour: earnings per hour online, minus your cost per kilometre times the kilometres that hour consumed. Running two or three apps at once usually wins not because any platform pays more, but because stacking raises the share of each hour that is paid — less dead time, fewer empty kilometres per dollar. We help drivers run the comparison properly for a few weeks — same numbers, per app, per daypart — and then commit hours where the net rate is, which is often not where the gross rate is.

The apps also differ on tax mechanics. Commercial ride-sharing is treated like a taxi business for GST/HST, so rideshare drivers must register and collect from the first dollar — the $30,000 small-supplier threshold does not apply to them, while delivery-only couriers still get it. Registration has an upside: input tax credits on fuel, repairs, and the business share of the vehicle. We handle the returns and the registration timing so the rule works for you instead of surprising you.

When one car becomes a small fleet

Add a second vehicle only when the first one is genuinely full — you are declining paid time, not just imagining demand. Then the fleet tests begin: capital for the vehicle without raiding your tax and HST set-asides, insurance quoted for hired drivers before you commit, a platform that actually supports fleet or partner accounts, and a decided operator model — renting the car to a driver and splitting revenue are different businesses with different HST, payroll, and liability consequences. At that point this stops being driver advisory and becomes real CFO work: a per-vehicle profit statement, drivers classified correctly, and usually the incorporation question answered before the second car, not after.

Some situations add a border: drivers in Windsor or Niagara taking cross-border trips, and US platform payouts landing in Canadian returns. Those layers live on our cross-border tax page for rideshare and delivery drivers.

Source: CRA — the platform economy and reporting rules for digital platform operators.