Frequently asked questions

Yes to both. It is a complete working account for 3 months with every feature switched on, and there is no credit card at any point, not to start it and not to finish it.

The reason it is that long is practical rather than generous: you cannot tell whether operations software fits your business in two weeks. You need to quote real work, schedule a real month and hit a real awkward week.

No. There is no card on file, so nothing can be charged. We get in touch before the trial ends to ask whether you want to carry on. If you do, we agree a price based on your fleet size and your account continues with all your data in place. If you do not, you can export your data and that is the end of it.

It is not a cut-down tier. Bookings, quoting, the run planner, fleet and compliance, reporting and the online booking storefront are all available, and there is no cap on how many bookings or quotes you create.

That is the point of it. It is a real account, not a sandbox that gets wiped. Quote real work, send real quotes to real customers, take real online bookings. If you carry on afterwards, nothing needs redoing.

Because we price on the size of your operation, and putting a number up that turns out not to apply to you wastes both our time. Tell us roughly how many vehicles you run and we will come back with a figure: it is a short conversation, not a sales process.

What we can tell you up front is the shape: a single monthly fee per operator, banded by fleet size, with every feature included. See pricing.

Per operator, banded by fleet size. Office users are unlimited on every plan: charging per seat encourages people to share a login, which is bad for your audit trail and bad for security, so we do not do it.

No. Every plan is the whole product. A five-vehicle operator needs online bookings and compliance reminders just as much as a fifty-vehicle one; withholding them to drive an upgrade would be a pricing trick rather than a product decision. Plans differ on fleet size and on the level of onboarding and support, and that is all.

No setup fee. We will tell you plainly what the commitment is when we quote you, and if you have just spent 3 months using it, you will already know whether it is worth committing to.

An afternoon to be genuinely usable. Add your vehicles, group them into the classes you sell, and set up one rate template for your most common kind of job. That is enough to start quoting.

You do not need to load years of history first. Most operators start quoting new work in Transport Chief and let the old system age out.

Talk to us about what you have. If your data is in a spreadsheet or exportable from another system, we would rather help you get it in than watch you retype it. What is practical depends on the shape of what you are coming from, so it is a conversation rather than a button.

Not formally. Anyone who can use a booking system will find their way around, and the parts that carry real risk (double bookings, capacity, licence mismatches) are checked by the system rather than left to knowledge. We will walk you and your team through it if you would like us to.

Mostly, and where it does not we would like to hear about it. Transport Chief is built specifically for charter and coach operators rather than adapted from generic scheduling software, so the things that make your business different from a courier fleet (vehicle classes, passenger counts, dead running, multi-day trips, rate templates) are modelled directly.

The honest caveat: every operator has one or two habits that are genuinely theirs. The trial is long enough to find yours, and we are still actively building.

A contact form collects a description of a trip and leaves you to price it later. The storefront prices it there and then, from your own rate templates, and lodges a real booking with geocoded addresses, a routed distance and a vehicle class attached.

The commercial difference is response time. Someone enquiring about a coach is usually enquiring with two or three operators at once, and the one who gives them a number first tends to get the job. There is a live demo you can try.

No, on two counts. The prices come from your own rate templates, so there is no second price list to drift out of date, and the server always recalculates the authoritative price when a booking is submitted, so the figure shown in the browser cannot be tampered with.

You also choose which vehicle classes are bookable online and which extras are offered. Anything that needs a human can still arrive as an enquiry.

Either. It can be embedded into a page on your existing site, or run as a booking page in its own right. It carries your logo, your vehicle photographs and your rates in both cases.

The storefront is bot-protected and rate-limited, and every request is scoped to your operator account. A public endpoint that quotes prices is exactly the sort of thing that gets abused, so it was built with that assumption rather than hardened afterwards.

In New Zealand. Every record is scoped to your operator account: no other customer can see your bookings, clients, rates or fleet.

It is yours, and yes. That applies during the trial and after it. We are not interested in retaining customers by making leaving painful: if the product is not worth paying for, a hostage situation will not fix that.

With their own account and password, or by signing in with an existing Google or Microsoft account, which is usually the better answer for a business, because it means you keep control of access through the account you already manage.

Every user has their own login, and the audit trail records who did what. That is the actual reason we do not charge per seat.

Handled by us as part of the service; you do not need to do anything. If you want the specifics for a procurement or insurance question, ask us and we will give you the detail in writing rather than a vague reassurance on a web page.

We do: the people who wrote it. There is no outsourced first line reading from a script, which is one of the genuine advantages of dealing with a small New Zealand company rather than a multinational's regional office.

Please do. Transport Chief is actively developed and operator feedback is the main thing that decides what gets built next. We will be straight with you about whether something is likely and roughly when, rather than adding it to a list you never hear about again.

Yes. The customer-facing booking storefront is built mobile-first, since that is where most people plan a trip. The operator side works on a tablet and on a phone at a push, though the planner is a screen you will want some width for.

No, and deliberately so. Transport Chief covers the operation: quoting, booking, scheduling, fleet and compliance. Accounting and payroll are well served by software that does nothing else, and a half-hearted version of either would be worse than none.

If you want to talk about how it fits alongside what you already use for the books, get in touch.