Taxi business KPIs: the numbers to track in a taxi firm

Turnover tells you how last month went. A handful of other numbers tell you why, and what to fix next. This guide lists the taxi business KPIs worth tracking in a UK taxi or private hire firm, how to work out each one, where the data comes from and how often to look.

Which taxi business KPIs should you track?

Track eight numbers: two about the phones, one about where bookings come from, one about drivers, and four about money. Here's each one, with its sum:

None of these needs a consultant or a dashboard. They need the same sum, done the same way, on the same day each week or month.

Where does the data for your KPIs come from?

Your booking records and your call log hold almost everything. Outside London, section 56 of the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1976 says an operator must record the particulars of every booking before the journey starts, in the form the council sets.

The Department for Transport's statutory standards spell out what that record should hold: the passenger's name, the time of the request, the pickup and destination, the driver's name and licence number, the vehicle registration, and the names of whoever took the booking and whoever dispatched it. The standards suggest keeping booking records for at least 6 months, and in London TfL requires 12 months.

Most of the KPIs fall out of those fields. The time of the request gives you bookings by hour. The driver's name gives you jobs per driver. Who took the booking shows how much the office handled.

Add four fields of your own if your records don't have them yet: where the booking came from, the fare, how it was paid, and how it ended (completed, cancelled or no-show). Then keep a monthly totals sheet. Totals don't name any passenger, so you can compare this October with last October long after the detailed records are gone.

How do you measure calls answered and missed?

Calls answered is the share of incoming calls that someone picked up: answered calls divided by all incoming calls, from your phone provider's call log. Work it out by hour of the day, because a good weekly figure can hide a Friday night where half the calls rang out.

Then count the missed calls that would have been a job. Take out your own drivers, staff and suppliers, treat repeat calls from one number as one call, and check the rest against your booking records. A number that has booked before was most likely ringing to book again.

That gives you the one sum worth writing down every week:

Missed calls a day that would have been a job × your average fare × 30 = £____ a month.

Our guide to missed calls in a taxi office shows how to clean the call log step by step. Ask your provider whether its log shows calls that arrived while the line was engaged, because some don't.

How do you track bookings by source?

Tag every booking with where it came from at the moment it's taken: phone, website, WhatsApp, email, app, a business account, or a hotel or other partner. A tag added later from memory is a guess.

For website bookings, put tags on the links you control. Google's own help says campaign links should always carry three parameters: utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign. For phone bookings, the simplest tag is to ask "how did you find us?" on new callers' first booking.

Dispatch AI is booking and dispatch software for taxi and private hire firms, and it lets you see where every booking came from: which website, campaign or advert. Whatever you use, the full method is in our guide to where your taxi bookings come from.

Once a month, put bookings by source next to what each source cost you. A source that brings few jobs but costs nothing is fine. A source that costs a lot and brings few jobs is the first one to cut.

How do you work out jobs per driver hour?

Jobs per driver hour is completed jobs divided by the hours your drivers were on and free to take work. Count it by shift, not by week.

Example only, with made-up figures. On a Friday from 6pm to midnight, 8 drivers are on for 6 hours each: 8 × 6 = 48 driver hours. They complete 72 jobs, so 72 ÷ 48 = 1.5 jobs per driver hour. On a Tuesday afternoon, 6 drivers are on for 4 hours: 24 driver hours and 18 jobs, so 0.75.

Read the two figures together with your missed calls. A high figure on a night when calls ring out means you're short of cars. A low figure means drivers are sitting idle and earning little, and idle drivers are the ones who leave. Our guide to keeping good drivers covers what to do about it.

What counts as a cancellation or a no-show?

Decide your definitions once and write them down, or the numbers won't compare from month to month. A simple set:

• Cancellation: the passenger cancels before the car is sent.
• Late cancellation: the passenger cancels after the car is on its way.
• No-show: the car arrives, waits the time you allow, and the passenger never appears.

Your no-show rate is no-shows divided by all bookings in the month. Split it by source and by time of day: a late-night web booking and an account pickup are different risks. Note the phone number on each no-show, because repeat offenders show up quickly. Our guide to reducing no-shows and late cancellations covers deposits, confirmations and policies.

How do you track average fare and account revenue?

Average fare is total fares divided by completed jobs. Split it three ways: phone bookings, account work and airport runs. The phone figure is the one that goes into your missed-call sum, and the airport figure tells you whether your fixed prices are holding up.

Account revenue share is account fares divided by all fares. Accounts bring steady weekday work, but if one customer is a large share of your income, losing them would hurt, so watch the share as well as the total.

Days to pay is where account work turns into a cash problem. The government's guidance on late commercial payments says that if you haven't agreed a payment date, a payment is late 30 days after the customer gets the invoice, or after the job if that's later. Agreed terms should usually be no longer than 60 days between businesses. On a late payment you can claim statutory interest of 8% plus the Bank of England base rate, and a fixed sum of £40 on a debt up to £999.99, £70 up to £9,999.99, or £100 on £10,000 or more. Our guide to winning corporate taxi accounts covers setting terms before the first job.

How often should you check your numbers?

Check the phone and driver numbers weekly and the money numbers monthly, on the same day each time:

1. Every Monday: calls answered by hour, missed calls that would have been a job, and jobs per driver hour for each shift.
2. First working day of the month: bookings by source, average fare, cancellations and no-shows, account revenue share and days to pay.
3. Once a quarter: put the monthly totals side by side and look for anything that has moved three months running.

Compare each number with your own last month and the same month last year, not with another firm's. Write down what you changed and when, so you can see whether it worked. The growing a taxi firm guides cover what to do about each number once you've found the weak one.