You drove 30 hours this week and the app says you earned $600. Great week, right? Not so fast. Subtract the gas, the phone plan, the car's wear and tear, and the taxes you will owe in April, and that $600 can shrink to something you would not have driven across town for. Gig work, side hustles, and small businesses all share the same problem: the number that hits your bank account is not the number you get to keep.
That is why we built the new Business page in IfISaved. It answers one question, and answers it honestly: what am I actually clearing?
Turn It On When You Need It
Not everyone has a side hustle, so the Business page is optional. To turn it on, open your User Profile and check Business under Optional Pages. A Business link appears in the menu, and if you ever turn it off again, it only hides the page. Your entries are kept.
The Number That Matters: What You Actually Keep
At the top of the page is the What I'm Actually Clearing summary. It shows, for the month or year you pick:
- Gross income: what the work paid you.
- Costs of doing business: your expenses plus your mileage deduction.
- Net profit: income minus costs.
- Set aside for taxes: an estimate of the self-employment tax and income tax you will owe on that profit.
- You actually keep: what is left after everything, with a keep rate showing how many cents of every dollar earned end up in your pocket.
- Real hourly pay: your take-home divided by the hours you logged, shown next to the hourly rate you would have guessed before costs and taxes.
A simple waterfall of bars shows where each gross dollar went: expenses, mileage, taxes, and what you keep. The bars are drawn to scale against the largest amount, so you can see at a glance which cost is doing the most damage. If your costs and taxes exceed your income, the "You keep" bar turns red.
A Worked Example
Say you deliver food part-time for a year. The apps paid you $18,000 over 1,200 hours. You spent $2,400 on gas, phone, and supplies, and you drove 8,000 business miles. Here is what the page shows, using the default IRS mileage rate of 72.5 cents a mile and a 12% income tax rate:
| Gross income | $18,000 |
| Business expenses | -$2,400 |
| Mileage deduction (8,000 mi) | -$5,800 |
| Net profit | $9,800 |
| Estimated taxes (self-employment + income) | -$2,478 |
| You actually keep | $7,322 |
| Keep rate | 41 cents per dollar |
| Hourly pay | $15.00 before costs and taxes, $6.10 real |
That is the kind of number that changes decisions. The work felt like a $15 an hour job. After the miles, the costs, and the tax bill, it is closer to $6. Knowing that, you might switch to a different app, work only the busiest hours, cut the longest trips, or decide that a different kind of side hustle is a better use of your evenings.
Three Kinds of Entries
- Income: money the work paid you, with optional hours worked so the page can calculate your real hourly pay.
- Expenses: what it cost you, sorted into categories such as gas and fuel, platform fees, supplies, phone and internet, vehicle maintenance, and software. Depending on the type of work you track, there are extra categories, for example inventory and payroll for a full business or hot bags and delivery gear for gig work.
- Mileage: miles driven. The deduction is the miles times the mileage rate, which you can change (the IRS standard rate changes most years, so check IRS.gov and update it).
Tag each entry with the gig, app, client, or shop it came from, and the page can compare them. The per-gig breakdown shows each one's keep rate and real hourly pay side by side, which is often a surprise. The app that pays the most per delivery is not always the one that pays you the most per hour.
It Fits the Kind of Work You Do
Choose your income type and the page adjusts to match:
- Gig work: driving, delivery, and task apps. Mileage and real hourly pay take the spotlight.
- Side hustle: extra income on top of a regular job. It starts with a 12% income tax rate, and reminds you that side income is stacked on top of your day-job pay, so it may be taxed at a higher bracket than you expect.
- Full business: a business that is your main income. It starts at a 22% income tax rate and adds a quarterly tax payment figure, since you will likely owe estimated taxes four times a year.
Bring In Your Transactions, Automatically
You do not have to re-type what your bank already knows. Two features do the work for you:
- Import from transactions: pick the bank transactions that belong to this work for the period you are viewing. Money in is suggested as income, money out as an expense, and you can change any row. Each transaction can only be imported once, so you can never double count.
- Auto-import from budgets: choose one or more of your budgets (say, a "Side Gig" budget) and new transactions in those budgets' categories are pulled onto the page whenever you open it. Set a start date so older history is not swept in. Anything you delete stays deleted. Once it is set up, the option collapses into a single quiet line so it stays out of your way.
Imported entries are ordinary entries. You can edit them, add hours or a source, or delete them.
Be Ready for Tax Time: Receipt Tracking
Deductions are only as good as your records. Every expense has an "I have the receipt" checkbox, and a coverage bar shows how many of your expenses are documented and how many dollars are not. One click on Show missing receipts filters the list to just the ones you still need to track down.
The page recommends one folder per tax year in the Google Drive or OneDrive you already use, plus a simple file-naming habit, and you can save a link to the folder right on the page. To be clear, we never upload or store your receipts. They stay in your own cloud storage. IfISaved just keeps track of which ones you have.
See the Trend
A month-by-month chart compares gross income to take-home for the year. You will see your slow months, your best months, and how much of each month's income survived the costs and taxes. You can filter everything by year, by month, and by gig.
How the Tax Estimate Works
The tax number is an estimate, so you know what to set aside. The page calculates self-employment tax (15.3% of 92.35% of your net profit, with nothing owed below $400 of profit) and then applies the income tax rate you choose to your profit after the half of self-employment tax that you can deduct. It is a planning tool, not a tax return. Rates, deductions, and your own situation vary, so check with a tax professional and the IRS before you file or make estimated payments.
Try It
Open your User Profile, turn on the Business page under Optional Pages, and head to the Business page. Pick your income type, import a few transactions or point it at a budget, and see what you are really clearing. If the answer is better than you feared, great: you can plan around it. If it is worse, you just learned something that may be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars before the year is over.
This post is for educational purposes only and is not tax, legal, or financial advice. The figures in the example use the page's default assumptions and are for illustration. Your results will differ.