Case study — Staff & passenger transport
Paid by the seat.
Spent by the kilometre.
Two units of account that never met on the same page — and a fleet running the Hinjewadi corridor twice a day on an occupancy figure surveyed the month the contract was signed.
Before
An occupancy figure from a year ago.
Staff transport is contracted per seat per month, and run per kilometre per day. Kaveri priced its routes from an occupancy survey taken when the contract was signed. Headcount moved, teams changed shift, and one client opened a second office — none of which reached the route plan.
Ad-hoc trips were authorised over the phone by whoever answered and billed from memory at month-end, which meant some were billed twice and some not at all. Night-shift escort duty was recorded on a paper register at the gate, which satisfied nobody during an audit.
After
Occupancy is a number on every trip.
Boarding is marked against the roster on the vehicle, so every trip closes with seats offered and seats taken. Fourteen routes were re-cut in the first quarter on the strength of that record, two were merged, and one late-evening run was withdrawn with the client’s agreement.
An ad-hoc trip now needs an approver and a rate before the vehicle moves, and both travel with the trip to the invoice. Escort assignment sits on the trip record rather than in a register, which turned a two-day audit exercise into a filtered view.
“We were paid for seats and we spent on kilometres. For four years nobody could put those two on the same page, so we negotiated on instinct.”
Operations head · Kaveri Transit
What actually moved the needle
Three changes, in the order they mattered.
01
Boarding marked on the vehicle
Thirty seconds of the driver’s time per trip, and it is the only reason any other figure here exists. Occupancy that is surveyed once is an assumption; occupancy that closes with every trip is a measurement.
02
Routes re-cut against the record
Not re-cut for efficiency in the abstract — re-cut against three months of who actually boarded where. Two of the fourteen changes were reversed within a month, which is the number we would expect.
03
An approver before the wheels turn
Ad-hoc work was never the problem; ad-hoc work without a rate was. Requiring both before dispatch ended the month-end reconstruction and, unexpectedly, most of the disputes with the client’s admin team.
How QuamBase handles staff & passenger transport →
The same arithmetic, one level down: unit economics per trip →
Your fleet, your numbers
Bring one shift. We’ll price it.
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