How does recurring shuttle planning work?

Recurring shuttle planning lets you define a repeating route — a factory shuttle, a school run, a fixed staff line — once, and after that you never build the daily trips yourself: the plan does. It knows the public-holiday calendar, it knows how to postpone or cancel a single occurrence, and every trip it generates carries which contract it belongs to.

Who uses it

The module is built for any business running the same route with the same stops every day: transfer companies running factory or corporate staff shuttles, businesses operating school services, taxi operators with a fixed line, boats or yachts running a shuttle route. The shared problem: the schedule has to be ready at 05:30 every morning, a trip generated without a contract behind it is unacceptable, and running an empty trip on a public holiday is a waste nobody wants.

How it works: the plan, the generation horizon, exceptions

A plan carries the route, the stop order, each stop’s planned time, its direction (morning/evening) and the assigned vehicle/driver (plus a backup). Generation runs on a defined horizon (say, the next 14 days) automatically — nobody presses “generate” — and it skips days on the public-holiday calendar.

Every generated trip carries which contract it belongs to — without that, the billing period cannot aggregate it. A trip under a plan will not generate if the assigned vehicle’s or driver’s document has expired on the generation date, or seat capacity falls short; document tracking supplies that check. A one-off, customer-specific exception (say, a factory shutdown day) both drops that day’s trips and posts a deduction line into the period’s billing statement.

An off-plan extra trip is a distinct, separately-priced type bound to the contract — it doesn’t disappear before month-end invoicing. A plan can be suspended and resumed; editing or deleting a plan only withdraws future, unrun trips, and never resurrects a trip that already ran or was soft-deleted.

Example

Example: A business runs a 400-person factory’s morning and evening staff shuttle across 6 routes. Each route’s stops, order and time offsets are defined once; the plan generates the next 14 days every night. On a public holiday the system automatically generates no trips for that day. When the factory has an unplanned maintenance day, one route’s afternoon trip is cancelled — that posts as a single deduction line to the period’s billing. Later that month the factory requests an extra shift trip; it enters the statement as its own “off-plan” line item.

How it is done in Rotenta

1. Operations defines a new route and weekly plan on the Plans tab inside trip and transfer operations, entering both directions and each stop’s time offset.
2. The plan is bound to a contract card; generation without a contract can be blocked by a firm setting.
3. A fixed vehicle and driver (plus a backup) are assigned to the plan; document validity and seat capacity are checked at generation time.
4. The system generates trips on its own out to the defined horizon (say, 14 days); public-holiday days are skipped.
5. An exception day (factory holiday, school break) is entered in one click; that day’s trips drop and a deduction line posts to billing.
6. An off-plan trip is bound to the contract as its own type and added to the statement.
7. Completed trips at period end flow into the billing breakdown inside contracts and progress billing, and from there into the invoice inside accounting.

For a D2-licensed transfer operator, every trip the plan generates already carries the fields U-ETDS reporting needs — passenger, route, vehicle — so the notification is never a separate, hand-built task.

Plan versioning and evidence

A plan is versioned: which date it took effect from, and who added or removed a stop and when, is kept as a queryable record — the evidence a billing dispute (“that stop wasn’t on the plan that day”) needs. In school-service mode, student, parent and stop data stay bound to the contract card, and assigning an accompanying staff member is a required field on the plan. A large passenger roster, like a 400-person factory list, is imported through the Excel import wizard instead of being typed row by row; a bad row shows up at the dry-run stage, and only that row is fixed and retried without disturbing the rest of the list.

Frequently asked questions

Do I have to build every morning’s trips by hand?

No. The plan generates trips automatically out to its horizon; you only handle exceptions — a holiday, a cancellation, an extra trip.

Are trips generated on a public holiday?

No, the plan skips days on the public-holiday calendar automatically. A firm-specific extra closure (say, a factory shutdown) is entered separately as an exception.

Can I open a plan for a route with no contract?

That depends on your firm setting. With the contract requirement on, a plan will not generate without a bound contract; businesses doing purely ad-hoc work can turn that rule off.

Does deleting a trip corrupt past records?

No. Editing or deleting a plan only withdraws future, unrun trips; a trip that already ran or was soft-deleted is never resurrected.

Which other modules does plan generation touch?

Price and billing come from contracts and progress billing, the document check from document tracking, and every generated trip shows up in trip and transfer operations. See every connection in our module guide, or reach us through contact for the right coverage.