Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar Income Tool – Sherpa Review
Introduction
Sherpa is an online service that helps aggregate self employment income and helps people analyze and display the data. This review focuses on the service as used to help collect and analyze rideshare income, but it can help analyze airbnb, and a few other self employment income streams. Currently, Sherpa helps drivers analyze and display rideshare income from Lyft, Uber, and Sidecar.
Initially when I started using it a few months ago, it was only collecting Lyft data through the use of daily and weekly summaries. It displayed total earnings, which would include tips and prime time tips. I worked with Ryder and Xiaoming, creators of Sherpa, initially to improve on the different breakdown and also to separate the different types of income, such as tips, PTT, and also miscellaneous income. I also helped Sherpa with the Uber rideshare income integration. Ryder and I were emailing each other for about a few weeks to figure out the best way to import Uber ride data. Sherpa settled on importing CSV files from Uber.
How to Sign up:
You can sign up using my referral code: Sign up for Sherpa!
[I will earn a few bucks from each referral so thanks for signing up using my link! Despite earning a few bucks for each referral, I was not paid for this review. I wrote this to help other drivers analyze their rideshare earnings to become better drivers.]
Below are the instructions on how to setup your account.
Lyft Sherpa Setup
How to set up: You will need to set up your email client to forward daily and weekly statements to Sherpa. You can check the Sherpa website for details. How I do it is that I set up email filters to automatically label just daily summaries. I then add an email address to forward emails to and then set my filter to forward emails to [email protected] Once you do that, the data get processed in a few minutes and its all automatic. Below are my settings in Gmail that work:
Uber Sherpa Setup:
How to set up: You will need to set up your email client to forward emails with CSV to [email protected]. I used a similar filter but enable it so that it detects an attachment. Once you set this up, you will need to log into your Uber account online and go to invoices, then click on the CSV link for each day you want to export to Sherpa. You can also export an entire week’s worth of rides as well. The CSV will go to your email and then since you set up your email client, it will go directly to Sherpa. Below are my settings in Gmail that work:
What Sherpa Displays:
There are three major parts of the website:
- The top part is a bar chart of the past few days. You can change to the past few weeks or few months. You can change from the default view of fares to number of trips, average fare per trip, miscellaneous income and many other breakdowns.
- The middle part is a pie chart of the different incomes from the different rideshare services to tell you how much you made with each service.
- The bottom display shows the raw data from each day you drove.
You can also break out miscellaneous income, like passengers and driver referrals, mentoring, toll reimbursement (from Lyft), recruit bonuses and also hourly guarantees for Uber that gets credited as miscellaneous income. 
The next part is a comparison of how you compared with other drivers in your city. You can see the different breakdown categories that shows you what you want to see. The data I have is pretty early so there weren’t many other drivers using it in Boston. 
You may be surprised to see my income this high for the first eight months of the year. Earlier in the year, there were less drivers and much more surge pricing on Uber and PTT on Lyft when that began in Boston around April. It was common for me to clear $500 a week easily just by driving on weekends, but many weekends I would average about $600 a week. I would average over $100 a week from mentoring on Lyft alone. If I wanted to clear $700 a week, I would need to drive over 12 hours on the weekend (Friday and Saturday night).
Below is a separate section on detailed analytics for each day in your range of view. You can see many different items on this list and you can check for errors in the data in case there was something wrong with your summary.
At this time, metrics like earnings per hour and mileage is not entirely accurate. They only get that information directly from Lyft and Uber, which means that they only get mileage based on trips, not your actual mileage. Also, driving time is also from trip time so you can see hourly earnings as very high. Most days I average $30 an hour and sometimes $45 per hour with Uber’s hourly guarantees.
To note, you can now add your custom car fuel efficiency (MPG) and local fuel cost, actual driving mileage per day of driving, and any expenses that are driving related through “Expense Tracker.” It’s best to enter in the information every day you drive so there is accurate information for when you are doing your taxes.
In the future, Sherpa will release a mobile app to help you log your data.
CityMetrics
About two months ago, Sherpa introduced CityMetrics to help you compare yourself with others in your community in order to gauge demand, trip and fare trends for the week, and earnings of other drivers.
The middle section of the CityMetrics page compares you to other drivers in the nation.
At the bottom, there is a leader board for your city for the best daily income and also weekly income. You will only see the person’s first name but you may know them if you see them on the Lyft Facebook Lounge.
Expense Tracker
Sherpa just released this function late last week to help drivers list all of their expenses as part of driving for Uber, Lyft and Sidecar. You can list your expenses according to the drop down categories. The only categories not seen in the drop down is Gas and Other but I believe more categories will be added in the future.
Keep in mind that if you deduct mileage from your taxes, you cannot deduct Car Maintenance from your taxes so make sure you categorize your expenses carefully if you intend to use data from Sherpa to do your taxes.
You can access it from the ExpenseTracker link on the top of the Sherpa member’s webpage.
- New Uber Drivers will get up to a $800 bonus after signing up: Sign up for Uber.
- New Lyft Drivers will get up to $800 if you sign up here using this link.
