PizzaBoy – Analytics for Couriers

Download for Windows 10
Download for macOS

PizzaBoy is a desktop app designed for gig workers who deliver food for Postmates, UberEATS, DoorDash, etc. Food-couriers, like other gig-workers are often urged to “work smarter, not harder” but rarely informed about how to actually do so. However, in order to work smarter, one must take a scientific approach, and that includes collecting data.

If you take the trouble to enter the details of your deliveries into PizzaBoy, you will be rewarded with a cornucopia of insightful analytics: the best restaurants to pick-up from, the best areas to deliver-to, and the very best people in your city: the big tippers.

In order to discover these gems, you have to have a significant amount of data – more than you can rely on your memory to handle accurately. Many couriers keep data in a spreadsheet, which are great, but will only take you so far. For example, if you wanted to see a list of your best tippers, you could sort your spreadsheet by the “Tip” column. But what if you wanted to know who was the best tipper on average? You would have to total up the tips for all of the customers that you delivered to more than once, compute an average, and then sort them. That’s a bit tricky for a spreadsheet, but PizzaBoy will do it for you in the blink of an eye.

Couriers often talk about how much money they are making, but most don’t talk about their profits. That’s because they don’t realize that gig jobs are different from real jobs, and they need to keep track of their expenses. PizzaBoy has features to track expenses and reports to tell you how much money you are really making.

Many apps also have buggy software, or follow confusing payment practices that make it difficult to tell if you have been paid for your services. PizzaBoy has reconciliation features, just like financial apps such as Quicken, that make tracking your payments effortless. You can balance your account(s) just like your checkbook. If there is a problem, you can click the “Not Reconciled” button and get a list of all the payments and/or tips that you have not been paid for yet. This makes wrangling with app-support people much less laborious. It also makes it easy to track tips that come in after a long delay, which is a common occurrence with Postmates.

PizzaBoy stores its data in a standard SQLite database file. This means that if you want to do specialized, advanced analysis that is beyond PizzaBoy’s current capabilities, you can do so with a standard SQLite client app. Or even write your own client app! There are free SQLite client apps available on every platform. So, while PizzaBoy only currently runs on Windows & Mac, you could, for example, copy the database file to an Android device and then download a free client app from the Play Store. Now, you will be looking at the raw data, and won’t have PizzaBoy’s advanced tools, but you could run the exact same SQL queries that PizzaBoy does. Writing your own SQL queries is not for the faint-of-heart, but the point is that PizzaBoy allows you to take the bull and run with it if you are capable of doing so.

Make a Back-Up Copy of Your Database!

After doing all the hard work of entering your data into PizzaBoy, be sure to make a back-up copy. It only takes a few seconds. Just go onto PizzaBoy’s “Help” menu, and then to “Open App Data Folder” and there it will be: PizzaBoy.sqlite. Guard it with your life. Copy it onto a USB stick, or make sure that your existing back-up process is capturing it.