Trips & Dispatch
Passenger job dispatch — the trip record, the allocation board, pricing and payment, and how Yipii feeds a dispatch system you already run. A closed product, available on request.
Dispatch is a closed product. It is not switched on by default and it is not self-serve — contact support to have it enabled for your account.
You run passenger work — transfers, tours, shuttles, contract runs — and the jobs currently live in a spreadsheet, a WhatsApp group, or a booking system that has no idea where the cars are. Dispatch is the trip half of that, sitting on the fleet data you already keep in Yipii.
If you run a dispatch or booking platform you are happy with, you do not have to replace it. Skip to Working alongside another system.
What it is
A trip is one passenger job: when it runs, who drives it, which car, where it picks up and drops off, what it costs, and who pays. Everything below is detail on those.
Two ways in, one record. The console is for a caller on the line — one screen, search first, built to be filled in while somebody is talking. The allocation board is for the day as a whole. Both write the same trip.
Every trip carries an 8-character code drawn from a radio-safe alphabet — no I, L or O,
which are misheard and mis-handwritten as 1 and 0. You can read a code down a phone line
without spelling it twice.
How a trip is structured
Status moves in one direction:
requested → confirmed → allocated → en route → arrived → on board → completed
cancelled and no show branch off it. Those three are the end of the line.
Trips are never deleted. A job that did not happen is cancelled or marked no-show, because a deleted trip takes its money, its driver's hours and its argument with the customer with it. The database refuses the delete as well as the application.
Stops are ordered and carry coordinates, so a job with three drop-offs is three stops, not a note in a comment field.
A return is a second trip, linked to the first — not a flag on the outbound. A car goes back at six whether or not the same driver takes it, and it needs its own driver, its own vehicle and its own price.
What the job needs sits beside the passenger and luggage counts: a wheelchair ramp, a tail lift, whatever your own list holds. Only fittings can be required, because a fitting is matched exactly and is never satisfied by a different one — a ramp is not a tail lift.
Add-ons are things the passenger asked for. Out of the box: baby seat, booster seat, water bottles, meet and greet, and a pet fee. Each one knows whether it costs money, whether it takes up a seat (a baby seat does, water does not), and whether you hold a limited number of them. Water follows the passenger count unless you say otherwise. Operators edit the list — prices, stock, what appears on which job type — under the board's settings.
Price and payment are independent. What a trip costs and who settles it are two questions, and a trip can be priced and still uncollected. Payment types are cash, card, on account, and complimentary. On account and complimentary do not collect at the car, so they never enter the cash ledger at all — they are collected by an invoice instead. Cash and card do, and the ledger covers every kind of work, not just journeys: a wash paid at a counter is money somebody has to count, and it is held by that site's till the way a fare is held by the driver. Money is held in whole cents throughout — no floating point anywhere near a fare.
Where a discount applied, the trip records which rule set priced it, so a fare can be explained a month later instead of guessed at.
The vehicle is derived from the driver, one way, from telematics — and the trip records where that answer came from. If a dispatcher overrides it, the override is visible as an override.
The allocation board
One lane per driver, one slot per job, positioned by time and as wide as the job lasts.
- The hatched strip after a slot is turnaround — the fare has ended and the car is still not free. It is the thing that makes the next job late.
- A gap label between two jobs turns amber when the gap is shorter than the turnaround.
- The bar under each name is how much of the driving limit the day uses, with the hours and the policy written beside it.
- The red line is now.
Allocate by dragging a job onto a lane, or by picking a job and clicking the lane — the second one works on a keyboard. The candidate list shows each vehicle's seats and grade, and says in words what a car cannot do: a job that needs a wheelchair ramp shows "No wheelchair ramp" against every van without one. Those rows are dimmed rather than hidden, because you may know something the record does not. Where nobody has recorded it either way it says so — a question, not a refusal. See Vehicle capabilities. Freeze holds the board still on the trips it had when you switched it on and counts what has arrived since, so it cannot reflow out from under a drag.
Two dispatchers editing the same trip is normal, usually while on the phone to each other. The second save is rejected rather than silently overwriting the first.
What Yipii does with it
This is the part a dispatch system without telematics cannot do.
| Yipii knows | Because |
|---|---|
| Whether a trip actually started | Ignition and position, not a dispatcher asking |
| How long the car waited | Time inside the pickup geofence, with the trace behind it |
| What the trip cost you to run | Fuel, expenses and service history already on that asset |
That last row is the one worth the most: charge minus payout is margin on paper, and margin minus real running cost is the number that tells you which contract to keep.
Working alongside another system
Dispatch is not all-or-nothing. If your bookings, pricing and invoicing already live somewhere else, Yipii can supply the live vehicle data underneath it and leave the rest alone — most passenger-transport platforms take a tracking feed, and Yipii is one they can consume.
Two routes:
- API. Assets, positions and trip data over the REST API. See Developer Dashboard for keys, usage and quotas.
- AVL websocket. A live position stream for a platform that draws its own map.
Accounting stays where it belongs. Yipii produces priced, invoice-ready trips and driver payout lines, and hands them to your accounting system — it is not a ledger and does not do VAT returns, credit control or payslips.
Getting access
Dispatch is enabled per account. Contact support with the shape of your operation — job types, roughly how many trips a day, and whether you are replacing a system or feeding one — and we will tell you whether it fits and switch it on if it does.
Related
- Drivers — the driver records dispatch allocates to, and their licences and hours
- Utilization — which vehicles are earning and which are parked
- Developer Dashboard — API keys and usage, if you are feeding another platform
- Vehicle capabilities — what each car can do, and what a job can ask for
- Expenses — the running costs that turn margin on paper into real margin