Taxi software
Minicab dispatch system
Minicabs cannot be hailed and cannot use a rank, so every single job is a pre-booking — which makes the booking record, not the map, the centre of the operation.
What is a minicab dispatch system?
A minicab dispatch system is private hire dispatch software for operators whose vehicles must be booked in advance through a licensed operator. Because minicabs cannot legally be flagged down or wait on a taxi rank, the system's job is to capture every booking, hold the operator record the licensing authority expects, and allocate work to licensed drivers in licensed vehicles.
This page also answers: minicab booking system, minicab software.
Key takeaways
- A minicab dispatch system is private hire dispatch software for operators whose vehicles must be booked in advance through a licensed operator.
- A hackney carriage can be hailed in the street and can sit on a rank.
- Driver badges expire.
- Most established minicab operators make their margin on repeat contract work — school transport, hospital runs, corporate accounts — not on the app-hailed job that gets all the attention.
Minicab dispatch system — the checkable numbers
- Every job is a pre-booking
- 100% booked work
- Licence expiries tracked
- Driver, vehicle and insurance
- Booking record retention
- Per-journey record kept for the operator's records
- Account and contract work
- Invoiced accounts with per-account tariffs
- Entry price
- £49 / month (Starter)
- Sector configurations documented
- 7
- UK cities with a dedicated page
- 16
structural to private hire licensing — there is no hail or rank intake to model
compliance records held against the driver and vehicle, not in a side spreadsheet
one record per journey covering booking, driver, vehicle and fare
the school-run and corporate contracts most minicab offices live on
list price, GBP, from data/pricing-plans.ts
count of records in data/verticals.ts, including private hire and executive
count of UK records in data/cities.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.
Why minicab dispatch is not hackney dispatch
A hackney carriage can be hailed in the street and can sit on a rank. A minicab can do neither: the work has to be booked through the licensed operator first. That single legal difference reshapes the software. There is no walk-up intake to model, no rank queue to arbitrate, and no meter-only fare to fall back on when nobody wrote the price down.
What it leaves behind is a booking-record business. The operator's defensibility — to the licensing authority, to an account customer disputing an invoice, to an insurer after an incident — rests on whether the record of who was booked, who drove, in which vehicle, for what price, exists and agrees with itself.
The compliance work nobody quotes for
Driver badges expire. Vehicle licences expire. Insurance and MOT expire. In a small minicab office these live on a wall planner or in one person's calendar, and the failure mode is not a fine — it is a driver working a shift on an expired badge and an insurer with a reason to decline.
Holding those dates against the driver and vehicle records inside the dispatch system rather than beside it means the expiry is visible where the allocation decision is made, instead of in a document the desk has no reason to open on a busy Friday.
Accounts, schools and the contracts that pay the rent
Most established minicab operators make their margin on repeat contract work — school transport, hospital runs, corporate accounts — not on the app-hailed job that gets all the attention. That work has its own shape: fixed pricing per route, named passengers, standing bookings that repeat every weekday, and an invoice at the end of the month that has to reconcile to the journeys actually run.
A dispatch system that treats accounts as an afterthought turns this into monthly spreadsheet work. Treating the account, its tariff, its standing bookings and its invoice as first-class records is what removes that week.
How to choose a minicab dispatch system
1. Confirm licence expiry tracking is built in
If badge, vehicle licence, insurance and MOT dates live outside the system, they will be checked when someone remembers rather than when a job is allocated.
2. Ask how standing bookings are handled
School and contract runs repeat every weekday. Re-entering them weekly is how minicab offices lose their afternoons.
3. Check per-account tariffs, not just per-fleet pricing
Contract customers are each on their own rate. One global price list means manual correction on every invoice.
4. Make sure the booking record is exportable
You may need to produce journey records for a licensing authority or an insurer. That should be a report, not a support request.
5. Test the phone-booking path, not just the app path
Minicab work still arrives largely by phone. If taking a booking on the phone is slower than your current screen, the desk will not use it.
The parts of TaxiCloud this uses
- Dispatch board
Single-screen live console with WebSocket updates and AI Copilot inline.
- Payments
Stripe + PayPal native, account-pay built in, settlements that close themselves.
- Reporting
Council-licensing reports, fleet KPIs, corporate statements — all native.
- Call centre
AI receptionist, press-1 self-serve IVR, automated arrival calls, and a live Call Deck — cloud telephony built into dispatch.
Minicab dispatch system — frequently asked questions
What is a minicab dispatch system?
It is private hire dispatch software for operators whose vehicles must be pre-booked. Because a minicab cannot be hailed or use a rank, every job starts as a booking through the licensed operator, so the system is built around the booking record, the licensed driver and the licensed vehicle rather than around a rank queue.
How is it different from a taxi dispatch system?
The dispatch mechanics are shared, but minicab work is 100% pre-booked, so there is no hail or rank intake, and the compliance side carries more weight: driver badge, vehicle licence and insurance expiries sit against the records the desk allocates from. A hackney fleet also needs rank and meter behaviour a minicab fleet never uses.
Does it track driver and vehicle licence expiry?
Yes — badge, vehicle licence, insurance and MOT dates are held against the driver and vehicle records inside the system, so the expiry is visible at the point work is allocated rather than on a wall planner in the back office.
Can it handle school runs and standing contracts?
Yes. Repeating bookings, named passengers, per-account tariffs and monthly invoicing that reconciles to the journeys actually run are all first-class, which is what removes the spreadsheet week most minicab offices lose at month end.
What does a minicab dispatch system cost?
TaxiCloud starts at £49 per month, rising to £149 and £349 for larger fleets, with drivers above the plan cap at £12, £8 or £5 per driver per month. Because minicab suppliers commonly quote per driver per week, convert both to a monthly figure at your real driver count before comparing.
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