Chapter 3

Fleet, drivers and riders

Vehicles, their papers, and the people who drive them.

Vehicles

Fleet holds every vehicle: registration number, type, seat capacity for coaches, cargo capacity for bikes and vans, and the branch it is based at. Types cover buses, minibuses, cars, trucks, vans, motorcycles, tricycles and bicycles, so a delivery fleet of bikes is as much at home as a line of coaches.

Documents

Attach the vehicle's papers with their expiry dates: road worthiness, insurance, hackney permit, whatever your state asks for. The dashboard warns you before a document expires, and a report lists everything expiring in the next month.

Maintenance

Log a service or a repair against the vehicle with the cost and the odometer. The vehicle's page shows its history, so the cost per vehicle is a fact rather than a guess.

Drivers and riders

Drivers (called Riders in a logistics business) is the roster: name, phone, licence number and expiry, branch and status. A driver is assigned to a vehicle for a shift or a departure; the assignment is what ties the money and the location to a person.

Link a driver record to the person's login so they can start their own shift on their phone and share the vehicle's location. Their screen shows only their own work: no reports, no money beyond what they collected.

A driver never controls settlement. What they collected is recorded against the shift; whether it is accepted is the manager's decision at reconciliation.