Duty slip, trip sheet, log sheet, duty card. Different names for the same document, and the naming varies by region rather than by meaning — some clients will ask for one and mean the other.
What matters is what it is for: it is the evidence behind a line on an invoice.
What the client is actually checking
When a corporate finance team queries a 148-trip invoice, they are almost never disputing the whole thing. They are checking a handful of lines, and against eight fields:
| Field | The question behind it |
|---|---|
| Passenger name | Was this trip for our staff at all? |
| Date and time | Was it on a working day, in a plausible window? |
| Reported and released | How long was the vehicle actually committed? |
| Vehicle and driver | Was it the class of vehicle we contracted for? |
| Distance | Does it match the route we would expect? |
| Charges | Do these match our rate card? |
| Purchase order | Is this billable against an approved PO? |
| Signature | Did our person accept it at the time? |
Miss any one of those and the query takes days. Have all eight and it takes four minutes.
The two timings nobody thinks about until they are disputed
Reported and released — when the vehicle presented itself and when it was let go — are the fields corporate clients check most closely, and they are the fields operators most often record loosely.
They matter because they decide two separate things: whether the vendor met the SLA (reported on time?), and whether waiting or extra-hour charges apply (released when?). A slip carrying only a start and end time cannot answer either question, and both become someone’s word against someone else’s.
Why reconstruction defeats the point
The most common failure is not a missing slip. It is a slip assembled at month end from memory and messages.
Consider who reconstructs it. It is the party being paid, working from incomplete information, under time pressure, with an incentive. Even when they are entirely honest — and they usually are — the client knows the document was written after the fact by the person billing them. Its evidential value is close to zero.
A slip raised at the moment the trip completed, carrying figures the system recorded rather than figures someone recalled, is a different kind of document even when the numbers are identical.
The signature is the whole thing
Everything above is your record of the trip. The signature is the client’s acceptance of it.
A slip without one asserts what happened. A slip with one shows the client’s own employee agreed at the kerb, when the facts were fresh and disputing them was easy. That is why a signed slip ends an argument that an unsigned one merely starts.
Which raises the exception worth designing for: what happens when someone will not or cannot sign. If the answer is “we leave it blank”, exceptions become invisible and you will not know how many you have. If the answer is “the driver records why”, you have a number you can manage.
Every client wants a different format
They do, and it is not obstinacy — their finance systems and their auditors expect what they expect. One wants A5, another wants A4 with a cost-centre field, a third wants their own logo and a specific column order.
Operators handle this three ways. Printing pads per client and filling them by hand, which does not survive volume. Ignoring it and sending your format, which works until the client’s auditor objects. Or holding the layout per client so the right one is produced automatically.
The test
Pick a corporate trip from three months ago. Can you produce the slip, with all eight fields and a signature, in under a minute?
If yes, your billing disputes are already short. If it takes a phone call to a vendor, that is the gap — and it is the same gap that makes month-end take a week.
Our page on trip sheets and duty slips covers how the document is raised at completion rather than reconstructed, and corporate billing and GST invoicing covers what happens to a month of them.