Digital taxi road sheets for Belgium

A road sheet is a per-driver, per-day record of a vehicle's service: who drove, which taxi, when the shift opened and closed, the kilometer index at each end, and the journeys performed in between. On paper, one driver can keep this straight. Three drivers rotating across two vehicles cannot, because the sheet only exists in the car and only gets back to the office when someone remembers to bring it.

The failure mode is always the same. Sheets arrive days late, arrive incomplete, or arrive with a kilometer index that does not reconcile against the previous shift on the same vehicle. By the time a manager notices, the shift is a week old and nobody remembers what happened. The gap gets filled in from memory, which is exactly the thing a road sheet exists to prevent.

Digitizing the sheet does not just save filing time. It moves the moment of capture from the end of the week to the moment of the event, which is the only point at which the data is still accurate.

In Tomcabs the road sheet is not a separate form somebody fills in. It is a view of data the driver already entered to do their job. The driver opens a shift on their phone, selects the taxi, and records the starting kilometer index. Each race is encoded as it happens with its amount and payment method. At the end of the shift the driver records the closing index and the shift is complete.

From that, Tomcabs assembles the road sheet: the vehicle, the driver, the date, the opening and closing indices, the distance covered, and the list of journeys with their amounts. Managers see the same record from the web dashboard the moment the driver closes the shift, not a week later.

Because the sheet derives from the shift, the arithmetic is consistent by construction. The kilometers on the sheet are the kilometers the driver entered. The journeys on the sheet are the journeys in the system. There is no second copy to reconcile.

The hardest part of road sheet accuracy in a multi-driver company is continuity. Vehicle 3's closing index on Tuesday night should be its opening index on Wednesday morning. When it is not, either a shift went unrecorded, an index was mistyped, or the vehicle moved outside of service.

Because Tomcabs holds every shift against a specific taxi, that continuity is visible rather than theoretical. A manager reviewing a vehicle sees its shifts in sequence with the indices attached, and a discrepancy shows up as a break in the sequence instead of as a number nobody checked.

This is the operational reason to digitize, independent of any regulatory one: it is the only practical way to catch a missing shift on a shared vehicle before the month closes.

Belgian taxi regulation is regional, not federal. Brussels-Capital and Wallonia each set their own requirements for what operators must record and how long they must retain it, and those requirements have been moving toward digital retention rather than paper books.

Tomcabs is built Belgium-first for this reason: the record it produces is structured around what a Belgian operator actually has to be able to show — per-vehicle, per-driver, per-date service records with distances and journeys — rather than around a generic international trip log.

Requirements change by region and by year. Verify the current obligation with the official sources listed on this page before relying on any retention period, and treat Tomcabs as the system that keeps the records available, not as a substitute for checking the rule.