Glossary · Bookings
Recurring booking
Updated
The same ride, every week, without re-keying it: a recurring booking is a template that spawns individual trips on a fixed pattern, such as every weekday at 7:15 AM or the first Monday of each month. Corporate shuttles, dialysis runs, school contracts and executive commutes are all recurring work.
Standing orders are the steadiest revenue an operator has. They fill the board before the day begins and they are usually billed to an account on terms rather than paid by card each time. They also carry the highest cost of error, because one wrong template produces twenty wrong trips.
The common mistake is generating all the trips at once, a year ahead. Then a rate change, a holiday or a new pickup address means editing dozens of rows by hand, and any that were missed go out at the old price. The better pattern is a template that generates trips a short window ahead, so edits to the template flow into future trips.
How liverybook handles it
Recurring bookings are stored as iCal RRULE templates, and a Celery task generates the upcoming BookingTrips from them every hour. Each generated trip is an ordinary leg with the full 11-state status set, so it can be assigned, farmed out, late-cancelled or marked no-show independently. Trips bill like any other leg: invoice lines are created as they complete, either per trip or batched at period end for the billing account. See bookings.
Related terms
This term lives in Bookings. liverybook is the operating system for ground transportation.