Taxi driver shift management

Scheduling software answers the question "who is meant to be working on Thursday?". That is useful, but it is not the question that costs a taxi manager their weekend. The expensive question is "what happened during the shift that was worked?" — how far the car went, what was earned, how it was paid, and what the driver spent.

Tomcabs treats the shift as the container for that. It has a driver, a taxi, a start and an end, an opening and closing kilometer index, a set of races, and a set of expenses. Everything the company needs to know about a day's work hangs off it.

This is why the shift is the right unit. A race on its own does not tell you whether the car was in service. A day on its own does not tell you which driver was responsible. The shift joins the two.

The driver opens Tomcabs on their phone, selects the taxi they are taking, enters the kilometer index, and starts the shift. That is the whole ceremony, and it happens once.

During the shift they encode races as they finish them: the amount and how it was paid. If they buy fuel, pay for a wash, or pick up a parking charge, they log it as an expense against the shift. At the end they enter the closing index and close the shift.

The design constraint here is that a driver will not use a system that costs them time at the wheel. Encoding a race is a few taps; if it were a form, it would not get done, and a shift log that is only sometimes filled in is worse than none, because it looks complete.

Active shifts, live — who is out, in which vehicle, since when, and what they have recorded so far. Completed shifts, with their races, revenue by payment method, expenses, and distance covered.

Across drivers, the picture is comparative: how many shifts each driver worked, what they generated, and how that feeds their weekly balance. Across vehicles, the same data answers utilisation questions and exposes breaks in the kilometer sequence.

None of this requires the manager to chase anybody. The data arrives as the work happens, which is the entire point of moving capture onto the driver's phone.

Drivers forget to close shifts. It is the single most common gap in any shift-tracking system, and how a product handles it determines whether the data stays trustworthy.

Tomcabs leaves the shift open and visible rather than quietly guessing an end time. The vehicle's kilometer sequence shows a break at that point, so the manager sees an unresolved shift instead of a plausible-looking but invented one.

A manager can correct the shift from the dashboard. The important property is that the correction is a deliberate act by a person who knows what happened, not an inference by software that does not.