Taxi software
Taxi dispatch system
One place where the job arrives, a driver is chosen, the passenger is kept informed and the money is collected — without a dispatcher retyping any of it.
What is a taxi dispatch system?
A taxi dispatch system is the software a taxi or private hire operator uses to receive a booking, assign it to a driver, track the vehicle to the pickup, and record the fare for payment or invoicing. Modern taxi dispatch software runs in a browser, pushes jobs to a driver app rather than a radio, and keeps one record per journey from the moment it is booked to the moment it is paid.
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Key takeaways
- A taxi dispatch system is the software a taxi or private hire operator uses to receive a booking, assign it to a driver, track the vehicle to the pickup, and record the fare for payment or invoicing.
- Strip away the vocabulary and a dispatch system is judged on four moments.
- Automatic allocation is the headline feature of every taxi dispatch system on the market, and it is the one operators most often turn down.
- Revenue leaks out of a dispatch operation in dull, repeatable ways: a job completed but never invoiced, an account customer billed at the wrong tariff, a card payment taken as cash, a driver settlement that nobody can reconcile at the end of the week.
Taxi dispatch system — the checkable numbers
- Entry price
- £49 / month (Starter)
- Price range across plans
- £49 → £349 / month
- Per-driver charge above the plan's included cap
- £12 → £5 / driver / month
- Deployment
- Browser-based, no on-premise server
- Driver clients
- Native iOS and Android apps
- Live updates
- WebSocket push
- Feature modules documented
- 10
- Interface languages
- 45
list price, GBP, from data/pricing-plans.ts
Starter £49, Pro £149, Pro Max £349
derived: Starter £12, Pro £8, Pro Max £5 — the rate falls as the plan rises
dispatchers sign in on any machine; nothing is installed on the desk PC
two shipped apps, not one wrapped web view
job and vehicle state are pushed to the board; the desk does not poll for changes
count of records in data/features.ts, each with its own deep-dive page
count of locales in i18n/routing.ts
Prices are list prices in GBP and exclude VAT. Counts are of records published on this site and can be checked against the pages they link to.
What a taxi dispatch system actually has to do
Strip away the vocabulary and a dispatch system is judged on four moments. A job has to get in without a human retyping it. A driver has to be chosen in a way the drivers themselves accept as fair. The passenger has to know where the car is without ringing the office. And the fare has to end up somewhere it can be reconciled — a card capture, an account invoice, a driver settlement.
Most operators are not replacing nothing. They are replacing a working arrangement: a phone line, a whiteboard, a WhatsApp group, a radio, and one dispatcher who holds the fleet in their head. Any system that wins has to be better than that person on their best day, not their worst — which is why the interesting questions are about the exceptions. What happens when the airport pickup lands early. What happens when a driver accepts and then goes quiet.
Automatic dispatch versus the dispatcher's judgement
Automatic allocation is the headline feature of every taxi dispatch system on the market, and it is the one operators most often turn down. Nearest-car is easy to compute and easy to resent: the driver who has been queuing at the rank for forty minutes watches a job go to someone who happened to be driving past. Fairness is a rota problem, not a geometry problem.
TaxiCloud's answer is to make both modes first-class instead of picking a side. Offers can go to the nearest available driver, to a bid map where drivers compete for the job, or to nobody at all until a human presses the button. A fleet typically runs automatic for the routine hours and hands the desk full control for school runs, contract work and the Friday night peak.
Where the money is lost, and how the system stops it
Revenue leaks out of a dispatch operation in dull, repeatable ways: a job completed but never invoiced, an account customer billed at the wrong tariff, a card payment taken as cash, a driver settlement that nobody can reconcile at the end of the week. None of these are dramatic. All of them compound.
Because a booking, its price, its driver and its payment are one record rather than four, the reporting side is arithmetic rather than archaeology. Account customers get their invoice from the same journeys the driver got paid for, and the weekly settlement is a report you run rather than a spreadsheet you rebuild.
Switching without a dark weekend
The genuine risk in changing a dispatch system is not the software — it is the fortnight when half your drivers are on the new app and half are still on the old one, and the desk is running two boards. Operators put the decision off for years for exactly this reason, and they are right to.
The migration route that works is to run the new system alongside the old one for the sectors you are least afraid of: pre-bookings first, then account work, then the phone line, then the rank. Each stage is reversible on its own. TaxiCloud publishes a per-incumbent migration playbook rather than a generic checklist, because what you export out of one competitor's system is not what you export out of another's.
How to choose a taxi dispatch system
1. Ask what happens when a driver accepts a job and then does nothing
Every system dispatches happily. The difference is whether the job silently sits with an unresponsive driver or is re-offered after a timeout you set.
2. Ask to see the pricing engine, not the price list
Fixed fares, meter runs, airport surcharges, waiting time and account tariffs interact. If you cannot model your existing tariff sheet you will be manually correcting fares forever.
3. Get the per-driver cost at your actual driver count
Headline plan prices hide the overage. At TaxiCloud that is £12 per extra driver on Starter and £5 on Pro Max — work it out at your peak season, not your quiet week.
4. Confirm the driver app is a real app on both stores
A wrapped web page behaves differently on a cold phone in a car park. Ask for the store listings for iOS and Android and install both before you sign.
5. Ask how the data comes back out
The system you buy is not the last one you will ever buy. Export of bookings, customers and account history should be a documented feature, not a support ticket.
6. Check who answers at 2am on a Saturday
Dispatch is a night-shift business. Support hours that cover an office week cover the hours you need help least.
The parts of TaxiCloud this uses
- Dispatch board
Single-screen live console with WebSocket updates and AI Copilot inline.
- AI Copilot
Your dispatcher's second brain.
- Fleet tracking
Live driver pins, geofences, and replay — accurate to 200ms.
- Payments
Stripe + PayPal native, account-pay built in, settlements that close themselves.
Taxi dispatch system — frequently asked questions
What is a taxi dispatch system?
It is the software that takes a booking, allocates it to a driver, tracks the vehicle to the pickup and records the fare for payment or invoicing. It replaces the radio, the whiteboard and, usually, a spreadsheet — keeping one record per journey from booking to settlement.
What is the difference between taxi dispatch software and a taxi booking system?
They are two halves of the same job and the terms are often used interchangeably. A booking system is the intake side — the web form, the phone line, the app, the account customer's portal. Dispatch is the allocation side — choosing the driver and running the job. TaxiCloud ships both, so a booking taken on the website is the same record the driver receives.
How much does a taxi dispatch system cost in the UK?
TaxiCloud starts at £49 per month on Starter, £149 on Pro and £349 on Pro Max, with drivers above the plan's included cap charged at £12, £8 and £5 per driver per month respectively. Competitors in this market more commonly quote per-driver-per-week, so convert both to a monthly cost at your real driver count before comparing.
Do we need to install anything on the office computers?
No. The dispatch desk runs in a browser, so a dispatcher can sign in from any machine and there is no server to keep alive in the back office. Drivers install the iOS or Android app.
Can we keep dispatching manually?
Yes. Automatic allocation, a bid map where drivers compete for the job, and fully manual assignment are all available, and most fleets mix them by time of day — automatic for the routine hours, manual for school runs, contracts and the weekend peak.
How long does it take to move off our current system?
The software is live the day you sign up; the fleet is the slow part. The approach that works is staged — pre-bookings, then account work, then the phone line, then the rank — with each stage reversible. There is a migration playbook per incumbent system rather than one generic checklist.
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