Automate the administration of a Belgian taxi company

Ask a taxi manager what their admin is and the answer is rarely one task. It is a stack: collecting what each driver did this week, working out what was taken in cash versus card versus platform, subtracting the driver's share and their expenses, arriving at a balance, writing it down somewhere, and then keeping a record of the vehicle's service in case someone asks.

Each of those steps is individually simple. What makes them expensive is that they are performed on data that has to be gathered first, from paper slips, WhatsApp messages, screenshots of platform dashboards, and memory. The gathering is the work; the arithmetic is the easy part.

Automating the arithmetic while leaving the gathering in place saves almost nothing. This is why an accounting package bolted onto a paper process does not reduce the load: it still starts from a pile of paper.

Tomcabs removes the gathering step by having the data enter the system where it is generated. The driver, who is the only person present at the moment of a race, encodes it on their phone: amount, payment method, and any expense incurred. Shifts are opened and closed against a specific taxi with a kilometer index.

That single change is what makes the rest automatable. Once every race exists as a record attached to a driver, a shift and a vehicle, the weekly balance is a query rather than an evening of adding up receipts, and the road sheet is a view rather than a form.

It also changes what the manager does with their week. Instead of reconstructing what happened, they review what is already recorded and deal with the exceptions: the shift that never closed, the report that does not match, the driver whose balance moved the wrong way.

Weekly driver balances, computed from recorded races, commission arrangements, cash already held by the driver, and logged expenses. Road sheets per driver, vehicle and date, assembled from shifts. Revenue broken down by payment method so cash in a driver's pocket is never confused with a Bolt payout landing in the company account.

Alongside those, operational reporting: activity per driver and per vehicle, expenses, and discrepancies between what was declared and what the numbers imply. Fleet records for each taxi, and member management for who has access to what.

None of this requires a separate data-entry pass. Every output listed above is derived from the shifts and races that drivers already encoded to do their job.

Generic international taxi software optimizes for dispatch: taking bookings and assigning them to cars. That is a real problem, but it is not the administrative problem a small Belgian operator has. Their bookings often arrive from platforms or from the street; what they lack is control over what happened afterwards.

Tomcabs is built around the Belgian shape of that problem: regionally regulated service records, a mix of cash, card, Bolt and Uber revenue in the same week, and driver arrangements settled as a running balance rather than a payroll line.

Regulatory obligations differ between Brussels-Capital, Wallonia and Flanders, and they change. Use the official sources listed below to confirm what applies to you.