Private hire software: what a UK PHV operator actually needs

Private hire software is the booking, dispatch and record-keeping system a licensed private hire operator uses to run pre-booked-only work. In the UK, private hire is generally treated as a pre-booked category rather than a rank or hailing one, so operators are expected to hold a booking record for every journey — confirm the conditions that apply to you with your own licensing authority. The software therefore does two jobs at once: it allocates and prices jobs, and it produces the booking, driver and vehicle records a licensing authority can inspect.

A private hire vehicle cannot be hailed in the street and cannot sit on a rank for work. Every journey has to be pre-booked through a licensed operator. That distinction is the reason the booking record matters, and licensing generally involves more than one permission: a licence held by the business as operator, a licence and badge held by the driver, and a licence and plate held for the vehicle. The exact structure, names and conditions are set by your licensing authority — TfL in London, your council elsewhere — so confirm what applies to you with them rather than with any software vendor, including us.

The consequence is that the booking record is not admin. It is the evidence the journey was lawful. A hackney driver can be flagged down and the meter is the record; you cannot. A job that lives in a driver's WhatsApp and nowhere in your system is a compliance gap, not a data-entry gap.

So private hire software is judged on something that sounds like paperwork and is not: whether every job — phone, app, web booker, repeat customer, account client, subcontracted work in or out — lands in one operator record with a time stamp, the passenger, the addresses, the driver and the vehicle. If a booking channel bypasses that record, it is not a shortcut. It is a hole in your licence file.

Conditions attach to your operator licence, and they vary by authority — TfL in London, the council everywhere else — so treat what follows as the categories to ask about, not the rules themselves. Get the current conditions and retention periods in writing from your own licensing authority; do not take them from a vendor's website, including this one.

The categories are consistent even when the detail is not. Booking records: who booked, when, from where to where, which driver, which vehicle, and when the job was accepted and completed. Driver records: licence and badge details with expiry, DBS status, right to work. Vehicle records: plate, MOT, insurance certificate, and which driver was in which vehicle on a given date. Complaints and incidents, with what you did about each one. Subcontracted or overflow work, showing who actually carried the passenger.

Two questions separate software that helps from software that merely stores. Can you produce all of that for a stated date range without stitching six spreadsheets together? And is what you hand over the same data the system recorded at the time, rather than a version somebody has since tidied? The second is the harder one to retrofit, and it is worth settling before you buy.

Every document your operation depends on has an end date, and the end dates do not arrive politely. A driver badge, a DBS, a hire-and-reward insurance certificate, an MOT, a vehicle licence plate — each expires on its own schedule, and any one of them lapsing can make a journey uninsured or unlicensed while everything else looks entirely normal on the dispatch screen.

A spreadsheet reminder is not a control, because it depends on somebody reading it on a Tuesday. What you want is the expiry date held on the driver and vehicle record itself, a warning window long enough to actually renew — renewal lead times are a question for your licensing authority and your insurance broker, not for a software company — and an enforcement step that does not rely on human attention. In TaxiDex a driver whose credential lapses is suspended from dispatch automatically rather than flagged for someone to notice.

Ask any vendor the blunt version: what happens at 02:00 when a certificate expires mid-shift? If the answer is that the driver keeps taking jobs until an administrator logs in, that is a calendar with a database behind it, not compliance tracking.

Because the work is pre-booked, the price is normally agreed before anyone gets in the car. That is the opposite of a hackney meter, and it changes what the pricing engine has to do: produce a number at the moment of booking that you are willing to be held to, on every channel, at three in the morning, with no human checking it.

UK private hire pricing is usually assembled from a small set of parts: a zone map of your area; zone-to-zone fixed prices for the routes you run constantly; distance and time tariffs for everything else; day, night and holiday bands; waiting time; airport pickups with their own access and drop-off charges; and surcharges tied to particular areas or vehicle types. Zones do triple duty — they price the job, they decide which drivers are eligible for it, and they are how you learn which parts of your patch actually make money.

One rule matters more than any feature list: the quote a customer sees on your web booker and the fare your driver is paid must come from the same calculation, computed once on the server. Two pricing paths will eventually disagree, and it will be a Saturday night when they do.

Street and app work is volatile. Account work — schools, care providers, hotels, hospitals, local firms, council contracts — is the base load that makes a rota planable. It is also the part with the most structure, and structure is exactly what a booking form designed for a single consumer ride does not capture.

An account customer is not one customer. It is an organisation with bookers who may never travel, passengers who never see a price, cost centres, reference or purchase-order fields that must appear on the invoice, and rules about who may book what. That structure has to be captured at the point of booking, because reconstructing it at month-end is where the arguments start. Then there is credit: agreed terms, a limit, and something that tells you an account is drifting past it before it becomes a bad debt.

School and care transport adds a layer: named passenger, named escort, the same run every weekday, and evidence of who carried whom. If you bid for that work, treat recurring bookings and per-passenger records as requirements, not extras.

A blunt test for any vendor: can the system invoice a month of account work cleanly, with no spreadsheet in the middle?

Requests differ by authority and by reason — a routine compliance visit, a complaint, a police enquiry, a licensing committee looking at a renewal — but the shape is recognisable. Someone names a period and asks for the journeys in it, with the driver and vehicle attached to each. They ask for the licensing status of those drivers and vehicles on the dates they worked, which is not the same as their status today. They ask what complaints were received and what you did about them. Sometimes they ask about one journey and one passenger.

Two failure modes cause most of the pain. The first is data spread across a dispatch system, a driver-payment spreadsheet, an email inbox and a WhatsApp group, so assembling the pack becomes a project and the result still disagrees with itself. The second is history you cannot show: if a record can be edited with no trace, you cannot demonstrate what you knew and when.

That is why an immutable audit trail and a single dated export matter more than they sound on a feature list. TaxiDex keeps both, and the export is drawn from the audit record rather than re-typed. Confirm the required contents with your own licensing authority — they set the list, not your vendor.

TaxiDex is priced per active driver: Starter £11/$14 for 1–20 drivers, Professional £9/$11 for 21–100, Enterprise from £7/$9 above 100, with a £79/$100 monthly minimum and a 14-day free trial. Setup is a one-time fee, scoped and quoted on the demo call rather than published. Note what the minimum implies: below roughly seven drivers you pay the £79 floor rather than per-driver pricing. That is our minimum, not a sector norm.

You will likely shortlist other UK vendors such as Autocab, iCabbi or Cordic alongside us. Any price, setup fee, contract length or tier threshold you read about them — anywhere, including here — is indicative at best. Get it on your own written quote, and read the notice period before the feature list.

Where we are not the right fit: a single owner-driver, where the minimum dominates the bill; an operator who wants the driver app to carry their own brand, since only the passenger app and web booker are white-labelled and the driver app is always TaxiDex-branded; and any buyer whose procurement requires named reference fleets of comparable size. TaxiDex is a young product. Our migration answer is a published 14-day protocol — both systems live in parallel, the old one kept licensed as rollback, cutover shift by shift — not a promise of zero downtime.