A booking is a confirmed job: scheduled, priced, assigned, executed, and billed. This article covers how bookings are created, how they move through their lifecycle, how 4fleet catches scheduling conflicts, and one important gotcha about recurring bookings.
Three ways to create a booking
- Manually - open the New Booking dialog and fill in the trip. If you supply only an email, 4fleet auto-creates the client.
- From a won enquiry - convert an accepted quote into a booking; the datetime, passengers, vehicle, price, and stops carry over.
- From a recurring template - set up a repeating job once and let 4fleet generate the instances (see the caveat below).
On creation, 4fleet applies your company rules (auto-confirm, deposit percentage), marks any linked enquiry as won, and can auto-generate an invoice when the booking is confirmed or completed.
The booking lifecycle
Bookings move through statuses - pending, confirmed, in progress, completed, cancelled - and each transition can trigger the right downstream action: driver briefings, reminders, invoicing, commission accrual on completion, and refund calculation on cancellation. Deleting a booking is a soft-delete to cancelled, and is blocked for jobs already in progress or completed.
Conflict detection
When you assign a driver and vehicle - or change a booking's time - 4fleet checks for clashes. It detects:
- driver and vehicle booking overlaps,
- driver unavailability blocks,
- vehicle maintenance windows,
- and "soft" holds from quoted enquiries.
Hard conflicts (a confirmed or in-progress job on the same resource) block the assignment. Soft conflicts (a quoted or pending overlap) warn you. It also flags tight gaps between back-to-back jobs. If you must override a genuine conflict, that action is restricted and requires a reason, which is recorded on the booking.
Important gotcha - recurring bookings skip the conflict check. Instances generated from a recurring template use the template's fixed price and do not get a route, deadhead, or scheduling-block time computed. That means they will not appear in conflict detection until you open them and recalculate. If you rely on recurring jobs, recalculate them so they participate in clash detection.
The calendar
The calendar is a unified driver-and-vehicle view showing time blocks for bookings, tasks, maintenance windows, flights, driver time-off, and invoice due dates. You can:
- open a booking's detail from its block,
- drag and drop to reschedule (which re-runs the conflict check),
- and see vehicle-switch indicators when a driver's day moves between vehicles.
The calendar is timezone-aware to your company's local time, so displayed times match your operating clock rather than the server's.
Assignments and route optimisation
For each job, 4fleet can suggest the best vehicle-and-driver pairings, ranked by availability, class match, workload, and capacity, using a computed service window (deadhead to pickup, the trip, and deadhead back). It also surfaces chaining opportunities - back-to-back jobs a single driver can share to cut empty miles - and route-optimisation suggestions with impact estimates.
Route, pricing, and multi-leg
Each booking gets a route plan: pickup and dropoff are geocoded, distance and duration come from the maps service (with fallbacks if maps is unavailable), and a billable-distance figure honours your deadhead policy. A single booking can also hold multiple ordered journey legs - useful for day programmes, multi-stop tours, and return legs - each with its own route, pricing, and calendar block.
Live tracking and flights
If you enable live tracking for your company, a driver can share GPS from the no-login capture page, and the customer gets a real-time tracking link. For airport pickups, flight tracking monitors the inbound flight across providers and can auto-adjust the pickup time when a delay or early arrival is detected - manual overrides always win.
Cancellations and refunds
Cancelling a booking computes a policy-based cancellation fee or refund tier from your company's cancellation window and deposit settings, and auto-cancels any accrued partner commission. For Stripe-paid jobs, you can issue a real refund that moves the money and updates the ledger.