The real incumbent is a spreadsheet and a WhatsApp group
Almost nobody switches to us from a competing product. They switch from a booking register, a WhatsApp group for drivers, and a spreadsheet that becomes the invoice. That system is free, everyone already knows it, and for a while it genuinely works.
Where each one actually lands
Written to be usable in a meeting where someone has both options open. If a row reads as though we won it too easily, check it — we would rather you did.
| spreadsheets and WhatsApp | cabsoft.app | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost to start | Nothing. It already exists and nobody needs training. | A licence, plus implementation time to configure rates, vehicles and roles. |
| Taking a booking | Fast. A line in a register or a message in a group. | Fast, but the details are structured — which is what makes everything downstream possible. |
| Allocating a driver | One person decides. Works well until the volume outgrows them. | Offered by rule, expiring if unanswered, so a job never sits with someone who stopped looking. |
| Answering “where is my car?” | Phone the driver. Every time. | Live position on the console and in the passenger’s app. |
| What happened on a trip last March | Scroll a chat thread, if the group still exists and the phone was not replaced. | The trip record with route, timings, driver, distance and signature. |
| Corporate invoicing | Collect slips, check them, price them by hand, type the invoice. Roughly a week a month. | Duty slips raised automatically; one consolidated tax invoice per client per period. |
| GST correctness | Depends entirely on who prepared it that month. | Place of supply, reverse charge and financial-year numbering applied by the system. |
| When a key person leaves | A substantial part of the operation leaves with them. | The rates, the rules and the records stay. |
When spreadsheets and WhatsApp is the right answer
If one of these describes you, we are not the better choice today. Come back when it stops describing you.
You run fewer than about ten vehicles, all street and phone work
If there is no corporate contract, no month-end invoicing and one person can hold the day in their head, a register is genuinely more efficient. Software would be overhead you do not need yet.
Your work is seasonal and irregular
If you run hard for four months and barely at all for the rest, a per-month licence is poor value against a spreadsheet that costs nothing while idle.
You are about to change what the business does
Configuring a system around a model you are about to abandon is wasted effort. Wait until the shape settles.
When we are the better choice
You hold a corporate contract
This is the single clearest trigger. The moment a client expects duty slips, consolidated monthly invoices and correct GST, manual billing starts costing more than the software — usually in a week of someone’s month.
Someone has asked you to prove a journey happened
An audit, an insurer or an incident review turns "we think so" into a serious problem. Chat history is not evidence.
Dispatch has become one person’s bottleneck
When bookings arrive faster than the desk can allocate them, growth stops being limited by vehicles and starts being limited by coordination.
You cannot say which trips actually made money
Rates that live in people’s heads get applied inconsistently. The leak is quiet — a few hundred rupees a trip — and only visible once it is aggregated.
Common questions
We manage fine on spreadsheets. Why change?
If you genuinely manage fine, do not. The usual trigger is a corporate contract that demands duty slips and monthly GST invoices, or a question about a journey you cannot answer from a chat thread. Until one of those happens, a register is a legitimate system.
How long does it take to move off spreadsheets?
The data is rarely the problem — existing customer, driver, vehicle and rate records can be brought across. The work is in agreeing the rules: how allocation should behave, what your rate cards actually are, and who is allowed to do what.
Will our drivers use an app?
They already use one — the WhatsApp group. The driver app replaces it with something that carries the job rather than a message about the job, and it is what makes verified starts, odometer capture and signatures possible at all.
Bring us the case against
Tell us why you think the alternative wins for your operation. If you are right, we will say so.