Vendor-neutral guide
What you own when youleave a dispatch vendor
Every dispatch vendor has a reason not to write this down, including us. Here is the list of what your fleet owns, what to ask for before you give notice, and the formats that decide whether the export is usable or just technically an export.
Why this is unwritten
The incentive problem
Switching costs in dispatch are not mostly technical. They are made of uncertainty: an operator who cannot say with confidence what they would get back if they left is an operator who does not leave. That uncertainty is worth money to whoever holds the data, which is why the question is rarely answered plainly anywhere.
We have the same incentive, and we are publishing it anyway. A fleet that knows exactly how to leave any platform can also leave this one. That seems like the correct trade: a customer who stays because leaving is opaque is not a customer, and pretending otherwise is how a whole market ends up with switching costs nobody chose.
Nothing below names a specific vendor’s terms. We do not hold anyone else’s contracts, and stating their clauses as fact would mean inventing them. What follows is the set of records that exist in every dispatch system and the questions that force a straight answer about each one.
The inventory
Six kinds of record, in order of how much it hurts to lose them
Customer records
Names, phone numbers, saved addresses, account references and marketing consent. This is the asset with the longest life — a phone number that booked with you in 2019 is still worth something, and a saved home address is what makes rebooking a two-tap job instead of a conversation. Ask for it as CSV with one row per customer and consent status as its own column, because consent that arrives as free text is consent you cannot rely on.
Booking history
Every job: timestamps, pickup and drop, waypoints, vehicle class, driver, fare and its components, payment method, and cancellation reason. Fare components matter more than the total — a single 'fare' column loses the split between meter, waiting time, extras and surcharges, and that split is what you need to rebuild pricing anywhere else or to answer a query from an account customer six months later.
Driver and vehicle records
Driver details, licence and badge numbers with expiry dates, vehicle registrations, plate numbers, insurance and MOT dates, and the document scans themselves. The expiry dates are the operationally urgent part: rebuilding a compliance calendar from paper because the dates did not export is how fleets end up running an unlicensed vehicle by accident.
Zones, tariffs and fixed prices
Zone polygons, the fixed-price matrix between them, tariff tables by time of day and vehicle class, and any account-specific rates. This is often years of accumulated pricing judgement, and it is the single most common thing to be told cannot be exported. Ask for the polygons as coordinates — GeoJSON, KML, or even a list of lat/lng pairs — rather than as a picture of a map.
Corporate account terms
Account customers, their cost centres, PO or reference requirements, credit limits, agreed rates and invoicing schedules. Losing these does not just lose data, it makes you go back to your best-paying customers and ask them to re-agree terms, which is an invitation for them to shop around at exactly the wrong moment.
Financial history
Driver settlements, commission, deductions, payouts, invoices raised and paid. You need this for your accountant and, depending on your jurisdiction, for a statutory retention period that outlives your relationship with the vendor. Establish who holds it after you leave and for how long.
The questions
Eight questions that get you a straight answer
Ask these in writing, while you are still a paying customer. The answers tell you what a switch would actually cost long before you have to decide whether to make one.
Formats
An export is only an export if you can read it
CSV or JSON
Usable anywhere. One row per record, headers that mean something, and dates in ISO format. This is what you want.
A database dump
Complete, and better than nothing, but it arrives in the vendor's own schema. Budget for someone to interpret it — the data is all there, it is just not in a shape anyone else can read without work.
PDF reports
Technically an export; practically a wall. A PDF of your booking history is a document about your data rather than your data. If this is the only offer, treat it as a red flag and push back before you sign, not after.
One more thing worth checking before you need it: ask for a sample export of a single month now, rather than the whole history at cutover. A sample tells you what the columns actually contain while there is still time to do something about it. Reconciling the full set is a separate job, and it is covered day by day in the migration protocol.
Free checklist
Take the export checklist with you
The migration checklist puts these questions on one page you can work through with your vendor, alongside the reconciliation checks that catch what a clean-looking export quietly dropped.
Does GDPR mean I can demand my data from my dispatch vendor?
It helps, but it is not the whole answer, and this is where operators get caught out. GDPR's data-portability right belongs to the individual — your customers and drivers can demand their own personal data. Your operational data as a business, such as zone polygons and your fixed-price matrix, is governed by your contract with the vendor, not by GDPR. Under UK GDPR the vendor is typically your processor and you are the controller, which does put obligations on them at the end of a contract. Read the exit and data-return clauses of your own agreement, and take advice on your specific contract rather than assuming a statutory right covers everything you care about.
When should I ask for the export — before or after giving notice?
Before. Ask while you are still a paying customer in good standing and while the commercial relationship still gives you leverage. Requesting a full export is a reasonable thing to do at any time and does not commit you to leaving. Doing it afterwards means negotiating with someone who has already lost the account, on a clock you do not control.
What if my vendor says the data cannot be exported?
Ask which specific records, and why. 'Cannot' usually means one of three different things: the data genuinely is not stored, there is no built export tool but it exists in the database, or nobody wants to do the work. The second is by far the most common and is a question of price and priority rather than possibility. Get the answer in writing either way — it tells you what you are actually dealing with.
How much of this does TaxiDex export?
Customers, bookings with their fare components, drivers, vehicles, zones, tariffs, corporate accounts and financial history, as CSV. We publish this because a fleet that cannot leave is not a customer we have earned. The same page you are reading is the checklist to hold us to.
Does an export replace a migration plan?
No. Getting the data out is one workstream; reconciling it against the new system and proving nothing was dropped is another, and it is the one that actually goes wrong. Our published migration protocol covers the reconciliation step and the parallel-running period in detail.
Ask us the same questions
This page is a checklist you can hold any vendor to, including us. If you want to see what a TaxiDex export looks like before committing to anything, ask on the demo.