Dispatcher

The dispatcher is the person who decides which chauffeur and which vehicle take each trip, then watches all of them at once. In a 20-car operation one dispatcher commonly covers a shift of 60 to 100 runs, and the night before is spent building tomorrow's assignments so the morning is only exceptions.

The job is part scheduler and part air-traffic controller. Before the day, it is matching vehicle class to booking, keeping drivers under their hours, and farming out what the fleet cannot cover. During the day, it is a late inbound flight, a chauffeur stuck on the interstate, and a customer calling to add a stop, all between 7:40 and 7:45.

Good dispatching is measured in money the operator never sees lost: the no-show that was caught by a phone call at the 20-minute mark, the dead-head avoided by pairing a return. The common mistake is giving dispatchers a tool built for the bookkeeper, so they run the real board on paper beside it.

How liverybook handles it

A dispatcher is an office seat in liverybook, alongside owners and bookkeepers; drivers and affiliate drivers are never seats. The dispatcher works from the run board, setting driver, vehicle, status and subcontractor inline on each row, with four stat cards (active trips, pending dispatch, available drivers, completed today) above the table. Status changes made by a dispatcher are written to the append-only event log, and optimistic locking stops two dispatchers assigning the same trip.

Related terms

• Run board
• Chauffeur
• Farm-out
• Office seat