Taxi software: every part, and which ones you need

Taxi software is the set of programs a taxi or private hire company runs its work on: a dispatch console for the office, an app for drivers, ways for passengers to book by phone, website or app, a fare and payments engine, and the records and reports left behind. Most firms now rent it as one cloud service, billed by the month per driver or per vehicle, instead of buying and joining up separate programs.

The phrase covers more than one product, which is why two people searching for it can want opposite things. A driver who owns one car may mean a meter on a phone and a way to take card payments. A firm with forty cars means the system the whole operation runs on. It is easier to split the category by who uses each part than by a list of features.

The office uses a dispatch console: jobs are typed in or arrive on their own, and each one is given to a car. Drivers use an app that carries the job, the route and the fare. Passengers book by phone, on a website or in an app. The owner needs the money side: fares, card payments, what each driver is owed, invoices for account customers. And the licensing authority, sooner or later, asks for records. One product can cover all five, or a firm can run three or four separate ones that do not talk to each other, which is where most of the daily friction comes from. Each part is taken in turn below, with a link to the page that goes further.

This is the part most people picture, and the part vendors like to demonstrate. A controller types a booking, or it arrives from the app, the website or the phone menu; the system prices it and offers it to a driver, by nearest car, by queue, or by rules you set. A live map shows where every car is, and a queue shows what has not been covered yet.

What matters day to day is less the map than what happens when things go wrong: nobody accepts a job, a driver goes quiet, a pre-booked pickup is ten minutes away with no car on it. Ask to see those moments, not the tidy ones. The two halves of the office side have guides of their own: how a job gets in and how a dispatch system decides who gets it. What the TaxiDex console looks like is on the dispatch software page.

A driver spends a whole shift in the app; a controller spends a minute or two on each job. If the app is slow to show an offer, loses the job in a tunnel or hides the fare, drivers find ways round it, and the office's picture of the fleet stops being true.

The basics are the same everywhere: an offer the driver can accept or decline, the pickup and the drop-off, a hand-over to the navigation app they already use, a meter that follows your tariff, and a receipt at the end. Behind that sit the shift, the documents and the money they are owed. Two things are worth testing on a real phone before you buy: what the app does on a weak signal, and whether an offer still reaches the driver when the screen is off.

Most firms no longer put a terminal in the car; the driver's own phone does the work. Where your licensing authority requires a sealed meter in the vehicle, that meter still sets the legal fare and the app works beside it. More on the driver app and the taxi meter app.

Passengers do not think about software at all. They notice whether booking was easy and whether the car came. Most firms need three doors. The phone has not gone away: a caller should reach either a person who can see their history or, for regulars, a menu that books their usual pickup with one key. A booking form on your own website catches the people who search for a taxi and will not ring. An app suits customers who ride often: they see the price before they book and watch the car approach.

Whichever door is used, the job should land in the same queue, be priced by the same tariff and leave the same record. If your website form sends an email that someone retypes, you do not have a web booker, you have a contact form. Check whose name is on the app, too: some vendors put your bookings in a marketplace app of their own, which in time makes your customers theirs. More on the passenger app, the web booker and IVR phone booking.

The fare is where trust is won or lost, with passengers and with drivers. Software should work the price out from your tariff (distance and time, zones, fixed routes, extras, a different rate at night) the same way on every channel, and be able to show how it got there. A price a controller can type over without a trace is a dispute waiting to happen.

Then the money has to be divided. Card payments arrive through a payment provider, cash stays with the driver, account work is invoiced at the end of the month. From the completed jobs the system should produce what each driver is owed, or owes, on the arrangement you actually have with them: a commission on each fare, a flat fee per job, a weekly rent for the car. Firms that do this in a spreadsheet do it twice, once to work it out and once to explain it. Finally the figures have to leave the system in a form your accountant accepts. More on fares and tariffs, driver settlements and taxi accounting software.

Taxi and private hire work is licensed, and a licence comes with duties to keep records. The details differ by country and by council, so the first rule is to read your own conditions. In practice an authority can ask who booked a journey, when, from where to where, which driver and which vehicle did it, and whether both were licensed on that day.

Software earns its place here in two ways. It keeps the record without anyone having to remember to, and it holds the expiry date of every driver licence, badge, insurance policy and vehicle test, warning the office before one lapses instead of after. Ask how far back the records go, whether a changed booking shows who changed it, and how quickly you could hand a month of journeys to an officer standing at the counter. For UK private hire the duties are set out in the private hire software guide; the fleet side is on the taxi fleet management software page.

One car, working alone: you may not need a dispatch system at all. A meter, a way to take cards and somewhere to keep receipts cover it, and a console nobody sits at is money wasted. TaxiDex has a monthly minimum that a single car will not earn back, so it is the wrong choice here.

Two to ten cars: the moment a second person shares the work you need one place where jobs are written down and one way to hand them out. A cloud console and a driver app do that, and the phone is usually still the main door.

Ten to fifty cars: this is where the rest starts to pay for itself. A passenger app and a web booker take pressure off the phones, account customers want invoices, and driver settlements stop fitting in a spreadsheet.

Above fifty: rules begin to matter more than people. Zones, vehicle classes, pre-booked work stacked days ahead, several controllers on shift, and other systems that need your data. At this size ask hardest about what happens when things go wrong and about getting your data out. Limousine and chauffeur fleets have needs of their own, covered in the chauffeur software guide.

Almost all of it is now rented by the month and runs in a browser, with nothing installed in the office. The bill is counted in one of four ways: per driver, per vehicle, per trip, or as a share of your fares. The unit matters more than the headline rate, because it decides what happens to the bill in a quiet month, when a car is off the road, or when the business grows.

Ask every vendor for the same four things in writing: the monthly rate, the smallest bill you can receive, anything charged once at the start, and what it takes to leave with your data. TaxiDex charges per active driver per month and publishes both the rates and the minimum on its pricing page. For the wider market, platform by platform, see the guide to taxi dispatch system prices.