A taxi fleet differs from a dispatch service in one thing: the cars belong to the fleet, not the drivers. Everything else follows from that — shifts, handing the car from one driver to the next, body condition, driver settlements, and dependence on the aggregator that sends orders. Taxi fleet software must cover these tasks, not just take calls. Below we go through what exactly to check when choosing, and show how UpTaxi handles it.

How a taxi fleet differs from a dispatch service

A dispatch service takes orders and hands them to drivers in their own cars. It needs telephony, an app and automatic dispatch. A taxi fleet also manages assets: each car must be on the line as many hours a day as possible, its condition must be monitored, and drivers change every 12 hours. If the fleet works with aggregators, there is one more task — not to be left without orders and clients when the aggregator’s terms change.

What taxi fleet software must do

Car and driver records

A car card with plate number, documents and deadlines, assigning a driver to a car, a history of who drove it and when. In UpTaxi, every driver registers through the online driver application form, goes through a document check and gets access to work only after approval. The statuses «on line», «photo inspection» and «blocked» are visible to the dispatcher in the console.

Photo inspection without an office visit

When a car passes from shift to shift, the fleet needs to know what condition it is in. In UpTaxi, photo inspection is built into the driver app: on a schedule set by the fleet, the driver photographs the car from the required angles, a neural network on the phone checks each shot, and the dispatcher accepts the photos in the dashboard. More in the news item on vehicle photo inspection.

Driver rating and discipline

Late arrivals, refusals and client complaints should affect which orders a driver gets. In UpTaxi, the driver rating is part of automatic dispatch: all else being equal, the order goes to the driver with the better rating and the longer waiting time. The owner sees reports on each driver in the manager dashboard.

Settlements and payouts

The fleet keeps a percentage from the driver or a fixed fee per shift, and sometimes both. The software must calculate this automatically for every order, show the balance to the driver in the app and give the owner a daily summary. In UpTaxi, the balance and transfers are built into the driver app, and driver commissions are configured to the fleet’s rules.

Own order channel

A fleet that gets orders only from an aggregator does not control its revenue. The aggregator changes its commission and priorities, and the client base belongs to the aggregator. The software must give the fleet its own channels: an app under its own brand, ordering bots in Telegram and Max, a dispatch service website, and a voice robot that answers the call and creates the order without an operator. In UpTaxi, all orders from these channels go into one queue together with orders from operators.

Corporate clients

Companies that transport employees and guests pay by invoice and want to see the trips. The corporate client dashboard in UpTaxi lets employees order taxis on their own and lets the company’s manager control trips and spending. For the fleet, these are steady orders with no aggregator commission.

Reports for the owner

Revenue by day, car utilization by hour, downtime, average fare, pickup time by district. The UpTaxi manager dashboard works in a browser, including on a phone.

Cloud or your own server

A taxi fleet with its own garage sometimes feels it is natural to have its own server too. In practice, that means an administrator, backups and updates done in-house. With cloud software, the server for the fleet is ready within a working day, backups and updates are handled by the developer, and the fleet pays only for the work. In UpTaxi this is 150 ₽ per day and 7–10% of driver commissions, with no license and no implementation fee. From 501 orders per day the daily fee is dropped.

Example: a fleet of 35 cars

Thirty-five cars on two shifts make about 300 orders per day at an average fare of 250 ₽. If the fleet keeps 7% per order, that is 157,500 ₽ a month in commission income. UpTaxi will cost 4,500 ₽ in daily fees plus 9% of driver commissions, about 18,700 ₽ a month in total. You can get your own number in the service economics calculator and the cost calculator.

What else to look at

Before choosing, ask the developer the 12 questions from our guide: about limits on cars and drivers, the test period, data, support and custom development. If the fleet is moving from other software, we transfer the driver and client database during onboarding, and you can run both systems in parallel during the switch — details on the migration page.

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