The rate card is the contract

Take any argument you have had with a client at month end and trace it back. It will end at a line nobody wrote down: what happens after the eighth hour, whether the minimum applies on the day the cab did only ninety kilometres, whether the night charge starts at ten or at eleven.

The rate was agreed. The rate card was not.

A rate is not a number

A number is what you say on the phone to win the work. A rate card is the set of rules that decides what the bill says, and it has seven or eight lines in it whether you write them or not.

You do not need every line for every client. You need the lines you actually use to be the same in your head, on the quotation and on the invoice.

The package, and what it hides

Eight hours and eighty kilometres is the most common local package in the trade, and it is a fair deal for both sides on a normal day. It goes wrong on the day the guest keeps the cab until nine at night, because two clocks ran past their limit at once and the bill now carries extra hours and extra kilometres, which to a client reads as two charges for the same delay.

Explaining that on the 31st is a bad conversation. Having it on the rate card, in one line each, is not a conversation at all.

The outstation minimum is fair and it is always disputed

A daily minimum, commonly two hundred and fifty kilometres, exists because a cab on a three-day tour is unavailable for three days whether it runs eight hundred kilometres or two hundred. The client sees a bill for seven hundred and fifty kilometres against a trip that did four hundred and calls it padding.

It is not padding, and the way to make that obvious is to state the minimum in the quotation the account signs, not to justify it after the fact. Where a client refuses the minimum, price the day instead. Either is workable; the ambiguity is not.

Freeze the rate onto the trip

Rates are revised. Fuel moves, a contract renews, a client negotiates. The damage comes from a revision applying backwards, when a rate changed in October quietly rewrites the September trips that have not yet been billed.

The rule worth holding is simple: the rate that applies to a trip is the rate that was agreed when the trip was booked, and it travels with the trip until it is paid. A revision applies to what comes next.

One rate card per customer, not one per phone call

If the rate lives in the memory of whoever took the booking, then two people quoting the same corporate account will eventually quote differently, and the client will notice before you do. The account's rate belongs to the account, written once, applied automatically, visible to everybody who can take a booking.

This is also how you find out that the client you think is your best one has been on a rate agreed three years ago.

Cancellations, and the cab that already left

A trip cancelled the night before costs you an empty slot. A trip cancelled at half past five, with the driver at the gate, costs you fuel, a driver's day and the booking you turned away. Most clients accept a cancellation line when it is on the rate card and almost none accept it when it appears for the first time on a bill.

Where this sits in TripSetu

Each customer carries their own rate card, and it is applied to the booking automatically and frozen onto the trip, so a rate change next quarter does not rewrite last quarter's billing, and two people taking bookings quote the same number. The booking carries the rate it was agreed at, the trip sheet carries what happened, and the invoice is built from both.

The rest of what the directory holds is on the features page, or bring your three biggest accounts' rates to a demo and we will set them up with you.