The Sunday evening problem
The spreadsheet was never the problem when you had three cars, because you were holding the whole week in your head anyway. It became the problem the week your head stopped being big enough and nothing else took over.
The question
Six cars, eleven jobs, two drivers who have not confirmed and one flight that may land early. The honest answer on a spreadsheet is that you think so, and thinking so is what makes Sunday evening the worst part of the week.
The failure
Nobody books a clash on purpose. It happens because the diary that says yes is not the diary that knows what the car is already doing. You find out on the morning, in front of a client.
The cost
The pickup moves by twenty minutes and now the driver, the client, the calendar and whoever answers the phone all need to hear it. Three of them will. The fourth is the one who ruins the job.
What the board does
Two behaviours carry most of the value. It refuses work that cannot physically happen, and it makes a change reach every place that needs it without you telling four different people.
The first week
Nobody should move a live dispatch operation on trust. Put the coming week on both, and let the two disagree in front of you while the old one is still there to fall back on.
Not the archive. The jobs you already have in the diary for the coming week, so the board is describing something real before anybody relies on it.
The clashes it catches on work you thought was clean are the point of the exercise. This is the step that tells you whether the diary you trusted was accurate.
No app install to negotiate. They open their jobs for the day in a phone browser, and the ones who want background tracking install the Android app instead.
Keep the old diary alive beside it. If the board and the spreadsheet disagree during that week, the disagreement is the information you came for.
The honest part
It will not decide which job to take when two good ones collide, and it will not make a driver answer their phone. Conflict detection tells you a clash exists; the judgement about which client to disappoint is still yours. And a board is only as true as what gets entered into it, so a team that keeps a second diary on the side has bought nothing.
Questions
Because the spreadsheet cannot refuse a booking. It records the decision you already made, including the wrong ones, and it tells you about the clash at the same moment your client does. What changes here is the order: the system objects before you accept, not after.
They open a link and see their jobs for the day, with no account to create and no app store to visit. There is an Android app for drivers who want tracking to keep running with the screen locked, but nothing depends on them installing it.
One for each person who logs in and works the board. Drivers you give an app login to take a seat, drivers kept purely as a record with their jobs and documents do not. Extra seats and extra vehicles are published prices, not a call.
Send the job out from the same board. The partner accepts from their phone through a tokenized link with no account, the committed cost sits beside what the client paid, and the client stays yours along with the invoice.
Yes, and running both for a week is the recommended way. Existing work imports, including past bookings linked to the client they belonged to, and any import can be rolled back in one action if it lands wrong.
No. It raises the invoices from finished jobs, chases the unpaid ones and shows margin per job, which is the part your accountant currently reconstructs from four spreadsheets. What they do with those numbers is still their work.
