Drivers Data

Bus and transport drivers are paid for the hours they work, but those hours are rarely simple. Split shifts, night hours, double-paid hours, consecutive working days and leave all count differently. The official timesheet arrives at the end of the month, and a driver who wants to check it has to rebuild the month from memory, notebooks or photos of route sheets.

Drivers Data started as a student's project for his father, a bus driver, and launched on Android in 2019. The audience is narrow and specific: people who drive for a living, record their day in a few minutes after a shift, and need numbers they can take to payroll.

Each working day is one entry: shift times, line, vehicle, routes, kilometres, fuel and any leave. The app derives the rest, including night hours, double-paid hours and consecutive working days, so the driver records facts once and never calculates them by hand.

At the end of the month the logbook becomes a PDF or Excel report laid out to be compared line by line with the employer's timesheet. Since September 2026 the same account also works in a web app at driversdata.codingshadows.com, which makes reviewing a whole month easier on a larger screen.

A logbook only works if it is filled in every day, often at the end of a long shift, so the effort of each entry was treated as the central constraint. Optional detail can improve the report, but mandatory detail stops the habit before it forms.

Three decisions kept the product practical:

• Offline first: entries are saved on the device and synchronised later, because depots and routes do not guarantee a signal.
• Import the employer's Excel roster and compare it with the logbook, so differences surface before payday rather than after it.
• Flag kilometre readings copied from a previous day, a common slip that silently distorts the monthly totals.

Pay rules differ between employers and change with collective agreements, so the app cannot encode one universal formula. It calculates the common categories and keeps the underlying entries visible, so a driver can explain every total. A report the driver cannot reconcile is worse than no report at all.

Adding the web app meant real synchronisation between phone and browser, including entries made offline on one device while the other is open. The trade-off was more engineering in sync and conflict handling in exchange for a product that fits how drivers actually review their month.

Drivers Data has more than 2,000 downloads, a 4.9 rating on Google Play and 5.0 on the App Store (checked 3 October 2026). The app has been developed continuously since its 2019 launch, shaped by feedback from the drivers who use it.

The app was demonstrated on PRO TV's ILikeIT in 2019, early independent proof that a focused tool for one profession can be understood immediately by a national audience.