Taxi dispatch software for bookings, drivers and the records your council asks for

A taxi firm rarely loses money on the journey itself. It loses it on the phone nobody answers, the booking nobody wrote down and the car that sits idle because the rota lived in a book.

An airport run, a school contract and a job from the rank are three different things. The first has a fixed price and a flight number, the second a regular customer who pays monthly, the third a meter. So we build the job as the unit with a type, not as a line in a diary. Cars, with MOTs, insurance and servicing, belong in fleet management software.

Someone who needs a car searches "airport taxi Nottingham" or "taxi near me" and rings or books with the first name that looks right. Booking on your own website brings that job in without paying commission to a platform: pick-up, destination, time, passengers and luggage, a fare agreed up front, and the job is on the board.

We build the site with a page for each kind of work you want: airport transfers, hospital runs, business accounts, weddings and nights out. What a taxi site needs is set out on taxi website design; a site with a booking form starts from 1,500 euro, see website design. The booking itself is a booking system for your website. Being found in the towns you cover is local SEO, with practical steps in local SEO tips. Taxis live on reviews; a Google review link sent after the job gets more of them written, and the rest is in get more Google reviews.

A board for a taxi firm plans two things at once: who drives, and in which car. A driver cannot be in two cars, and a car cannot go out with two drivers. The board spots a clash before the shift starts and suggests a free car. It also tracks who has done two nights in a row and which car is due its test.

That rota connects to hours and contracts. For employed staff there is staff scheduling software and a time tracking app that adds up the shifts. A driver app is built as a custom app; a rough budget is in app development cost. If you are weighing this against an off-the-shelf dispatch system, build vs buy software sets out the trade-off.

Private hire in England and Wales runs on a council licence and duties per booking, per driver and per member of staff. These are the rules that most often belong in your system.

Councils add their own conditions on top, so check yours before we build; the software follows what your licence says. Because the records hold names, addresses and journeys, how long you keep them and who sees them matters; UK GDPR vs EU GDPR covers the basics. VAT already runs through Making Tax Digital, and B2B e-invoicing over Peppol becomes mandatory from 1 April 2029; see e-invoicing in the UK. The software applies for nothing and reports nothing on your behalf.

AI does not take the phone off your dispatcher. It removes the retyping: an email from a hotel, a message from a travel agent or a list from a school becomes a set of jobs with time, address and passengers, ready to confirm. The dispatcher picks the cars and presses confirm; the customer gets the confirmation with the fare. On your website an AI chatbot can answer questions at night about airport fares or a wheelchair-accessible car, and propose a booking that a person checks before it is saved. More in AI in transport and AI customer service.

For a lot of taxi firms, finding drivers is harder than finding passengers. An applicant wants to know whether they drive days or nights, in which car and how pay works. So we build the vacancy on your own site with a few questions that count: do they hold a private hire licence already, how long they have had a full licence, which shifts suit them, which languages they speak. Applicants without a licence see what the council asks before they apply. You see everyone in a list with their status. How you stand out as an employer is employer branding, and AI for HR speeds up the first replies.

An owner-driver with one car does not need an ERP. An office with forty cars needs more than a booking book. What we would put in place depends on headcount.

Once a few business accounts book regularly, a client portal where they book and find their statements pays off. The monthly invoices themselves can go out through Peppol invoicing software ahead of 2029.

That is 10 hours a week, 500 hours over 50 weeks. At £25: 500 x 25 = £12,500 a year. Add the bookings nobody took at night. Suppose 4 more jobs a week come in through the site because nobody has to answer the phone: 4 x 20 x 50 = £4,000 in fares. Together £16,500 a year in this example. Plug in your own figures and the result moves. What custom software costs in general is in custom software development cost.

Three questions come up with taxi firms. Does it work for hackney carriage work from the rank as well as private hire? Yes: rank jobs get their own type, with the meter fare entered by the driver, while pre-booked work keeps the full booking record. Can subcontracted operators see jobs you pass on? Yes, with their own role that shows only those jobs, and each one is marked with the operator who took it. Can you start small? Yes. If you are new, read start a taxi business in the UK first, then begin with a website and a job list on the phone.

We also build for couriers on courier companies, and for heavier vehicles on transport software.

No taxi firm is on our client list yet; what does run every day since July 2026 is the clash-checking board and three-language driver app at DA Logistics, with about thirty drivers and 34 vehicles.