Run home-to-school transport with the precision your council demands.
routeryde is a modern SaaS designed end-to-end for Local Authority HTS departments. Replace spreadsheets and old legacy databases with one elegant platform that bills operators to the penny, proves statutory compliance, and gives your team back their week.
Designed alongside current Local Authority transport officers
Most councils still run a multi-million pound statutory duty on multiple spreadsheets.
Shared Excel sheets between officers. PDF invoices reconciled by hand. It all adds up over time — operators occasionally over-billed, eligibility reviews easy to miss, year-end audits more stressful than they need to be, and a statutory duty resting on whether someone remembered to update the right cell.
Spreadsheet chaos
Student lists, contract rates, term dates and absences scattered across dozens of files. One typo cascades into thousands of pounds of incorrect billing.
Manual billing reconciliation
Officers spend days each month cross-checking operator invoices line-by-line — and still miss inset days, school holidays, and pupil absences.
Compliance blind spots
Eligibility codes expire silently. Students sit on contracts without an active budget code. SEN provision gaps go undetected. When DfE asks, there's no audit trail to point to.
No single source of truth
Finance has one number. Operations has another. Leadership gets a third in the quarterly board pack. Decisions are made on conflicting data.
"We need a modern system — one that brings financial reporting, communications, incidents and our yearly KPIs together in one place." — Transport Manager, Brighton & Hove City Council
One command centre. Every part of HTS transport, connected.
Students, schools, operators, contracts, codes, finances, incidents, and compliance — modelled in a single live database, surfaced through an interface your team will actually enjoy using.
Everything your transport team manages — modelled cleanly, connected end-to-end.
From a new pupil's first day to the year-end reconciliation. From a parent phone call at 8.42am to a contract renewal in 90 days' time. Every record, every relationship, every change — held in one elegant platform.
Students
- Demographics, year group, multiple addresses
- Parents & guardians with all contact details
- Past communications log — calls, emails, notes
- Medical records linked to vehicle requirements
- Custom alerts: medical, high-risk, safeguarding
- Eligibility code history (HTS, SEN, LAC, …)
- Budget code assignment with full rate history
Schools & establishments
- School records with head teacher & key contacts
- Configurable day start & end times
- Term periods, half-terms & inset days
- Linked operator contracts at a glance
- Full student roll attending the school
- UK bank holidays auto-synced from gov.uk
Operators & contracts
- Operator records with multiple contracts each
- Budget code & daily rate per contract
- Contract validity windows & renewal countdowns
- Add or remove students with budget-code guardrails
- Incident log — breakdowns, accidents, complaints
- Per-contract analytics
Travel & trip assignments
- Student → contract assignment with code guardrails
- AM & PM journeys tracked independently
- Per-day toggling: Confirmed, Pupil Ill, Inset, Holiday
- Term-by-term assignment with effective dates
- Bulk renewal workflows for the academic year
- Real-time billing impact on every change
Finance & reporting
- Point-in-time per-operator invoices
- Full-council financial reports, any date range
- Term-by-term & academic-year totals
- Excel export — one click, audit-ready
- Budget forecasting to end of academic year
- Year-end reconciliation in hours, not weeks
Compliance, alerts & audit
- Live compliance alerts across multiple categories
- Eligibility code expiry & renewal tracking
- Students missing a budget code (billing-risk flag)
- SEN & LAC statutory coverage monitoring
- Audit log on every create, update & delete
- GDPR-aligned data trail per record
The budget code engine: penny-accurate billing, on autopilot.
Every student is assigned an eligibility code and a budget code (ELA001, ELA002, …) with effective dates. Every operator contract carries the daily rate for the budget code it serves. When a student rides, routeryde already knows what the council owes — to the penny, accounting for student absences, term dates, inset days, bank holidays, and the exact day a code or rate changed.
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Temporal validity built-in. Codes and rates have
validFrom/validTo. Change a rate mid-term — historical billing stays correct, future billing updates instantly. -
Contract-level guardrails. A student can only be assigned to a contract whose budget code matches their own. No more mismatched billing.
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AM and PM, tracked independently. Daily rate ÷ 2 = per-journey cost. Toggle a missed morning or afternoon, the report reflects it immediately.
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Non-billable days, automatically excluded. Weekends, UK bank holidays (live from gov.uk), school inset days, and per-school term exceptions — all subtracted before a single invoice is generated.
Every workflow your transport team runs — refined into one platform.
A complete picture of every child you transport.
One screen for each student: addresses, parent/guardian contacts, schools, eligibility & budget codes, medical needs, past communications, alerts, and AM/PM trip assignments. Toggle a missed morning with one click — it flows straight into the financial report.
- Multiple addresses, contacts, schools per child
- Communication log with parents/carers
- Medical records linked to vehicle type
- Custom alerts (medical, high-risk, safeguarding)
- AM/PM travel toggle — billing-grade absence tracking
| Day | AM | PM | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mon | ✓ | ✓ | Confirmed |
| Tue | ✓ | ✗ | Pupil ill (PM) |
| Wed | ✓ | ✓ | Confirmed |
| Thu | Inset day · Oakridge | Non-billable | |
| Fri | ✓ | ✓ | Confirmed |
Every operator, every contract, every incident — in one place.
Onboard transport operators in minutes. For each contract, set the budget code, daily rate (round-trip), and term validity. See the assigned cohort, daily breakdown rate that feeds finance, and the full incident history — accidents, breakdowns, complaints — all timestamped for compliance.
- Operator → contracts → students hierarchy
- Budget code & daily rate per contract
- Add/remove students with guardrail checks
- Incident & analytics log per contract
- Contract validity & renewal alerts
05 May · A14 westbound · Resolved 47 min
22 Apr · 12 min · Apologised to parent
School term calendars, modelled correctly.
Add a school in seconds: head teacher details, school day start/end times, term periods. Layer in inset days and one-off closures on top of the national bank holiday calendar. See every contract and every student linked to that school in one click — and watch billing automatically respect their calendar.
- Head teacher & key contact records
- Configurable start/end times per school
- Term periods + inset days + closures
- UK bank holidays pre-loaded from gov.uk
- Linked contracts and student lists
Point-in-time accuracy. Excel-exportable. Audit-ready.
Generate an invoice for any operator, any month — or the whole council, any quarter. routeryde resolves the right rate for each journey on each date, subtracts every non-billable day, applies every student absence, and exports cleanly to Excel for finance review. No more manual reconciliation.
- Per-operator invoice, grouped by month
- Full-council financial reports
- Budget forecasting to end of academic year
- Term-by-term & academic-year totals
- One-click Excel export
| Contract | Code | Students | Days | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CON-238 North SEN | ELA-007 | 14 | 18 | £6,249.60 |
| CON-241 East Primary | ELA-003 | 22 | 18 | £5,108.40 |
| CON-262 LAC Run | ELA-011 | 4 | 17 | £2,924.00 |
| CON-271 South Quadrant | ELA-005 | 11 | 18 | £4,120.50 |
The numbers your director's report is built on.
Custom filters, live KPIs, exportable insights. Track cost per student vs. the £3,000 national benchmark, SEN provision rate, LAC safeguarding compliance, incident rate per 1,000 journeys, operator market concentration, and budget code distribution — all from one screen.
- Cost per student vs. national average
- SEN & LAC statutory coverage
- Incident rate per 1,000 journeys
- Operator concentration & market risk
- Custom filters & queries · CSV export
The things easy to forget — never forgotten again.
routeryde scans your data continuously for the issues that quietly cost councils money and break statutory compliance. Expiring eligibility codes. Students without an active budget code (silently breaking your billing). Contract renewals creeping up. Over-capacity contracts. Every alert is surfaced in plain English, with the affected record one click away.
- Expired & expiring eligibility codes
- Students missing a budget code → billing risk
- Contract renewal countdowns
- Over-capacity contract flags
- SEN & LAC statutory coverage monitoring
Four steps from spreadsheets to a live operation.
Import your data
We onboard your students, schools, operators, and contracts from any source — CSV, Excel, Access, even legacy bespoke systems. Migration is included.
Define your codes
Set up your eligibility framework and budget codes with their effective rates. routeryde mirrors your local policy exactly.
Train your team
The interface was designed for non-technical users. Onboarding sessions included.
Run the operation
Bill operators accurately. Catch compliance issues early. Report to leadership confidently. Free up your team's week.
Designed around the way Local Authority transport actually works.
routeryde is not a generic logistics tool retrofitted for councils. Every concept — from the academic year to inset days to your statutory transport duty — is modelled in code. The system speaks your language out of the box.
What council transport teams are telling us.
We've spent time listening to the people who actually run home-to-school transport day to day. The same pain points keep surfacing — and they're the exact problems routeryde was built to solve.
We need software that's easy to use, update and manage everything.
We need financial reports we can actually export cleanly for operator contract billing.
Direct feedback from senior council transport officers — shared in market research feedback and conversations.
Show your team what HTS transport looks like in 2026.
A 30-minute demo with the founding team. We'll use your council's real-world structure as the example — your codes, your operators, your schools. By the end you'll know exactly how much time and money this returns to your team.