Documentation
How the platform works, written for the person actually running the fleet.
Getting started
Four things get you from an empty account to a job on the road.
- Create your company. Name, operating country, currency and timezone. The timezone matters more than it looks: every pickup time you type is read as your local clock, and every confirmation your customer receives is written in it.
- Set your rate card. Until you do, the platform has no way to price a trip. See Pricing.
- Get drivers on. Either invite your own or use the shared marketplace. See Drivers.
- Take a booking. By hand, through your website widget, or by letting the AI agent answer the phone.
Check your timezone first. If your company timezone is wrong, bookings will be stored at the wrong hour and your customer's confirmation will say something different from your own board. It is in Settings, and it takes five seconds.
Taking bookings
Four ways in. They all end up as the same job on the same board.
By hand
New job in the dispatcher dashboard. Pickup, drop-off (or hours for an as-directed booking), date and time, vehicle class, passengers and luggage. The price calculator prices it from your rate card as you type, and you can override it.
Your website booking widget
An embeddable form your customers fill in themselves. It quotes from your rate card live, takes the passenger's details, and creates the job. Hourly bookings through the widget have a minimum of five hours inside London and six hours outside it.
The AI phone agent
Answers your booking line, takes the details in conversation, quotes from your rate card and creates the job. Every call is transcribed and kept, with a summary and the details the agent captured, so you can see exactly what was agreed. If a caller asks for something the agent should not handle, it can hand off.
The AI WhatsApp agent
The same thing over WhatsApp, on its own number. Chats appear alongside phone calls in your conversation list.
Pricing
Your rate card is per vehicle class and per service type, so a First Class airport transfer and a Jet Class hourly booking are priced from different rows.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Base price | The floor for that class and service. |
| Per-mile rate | Added on top for distance-based trips. |
| Distance bands | Different rates at different distances, for the long runs where a flat per-mile is wrong. |
| Minimum hours | For as-directed bookings. |
| Night surcharge | An amount added automatically to pickups in a window you define. |
| Route difficulty | An adjustment for routes that take longer than their mileage suggests. |
The four vehicle classes are First Class (saloon), Business Van, SUV and Jet Class (large van or minibus). Each has a capacity for passengers and luggage, and the platform checks a booking actually fits the car before it is created through an automated channel. A dispatcher entering a job by hand can override that, because you may know something the capacity table does not.
For a large party the fleet planner will split a booking across several vehicles, including a support vehicle for luggage that will not fit in the boots of the passenger cars.
There is no minimum price. A job can be priced at zero for a complimentary or promotional ride, and no payment link is sent for it.
Dispatching a job
A new job starts as PENDING and belongs to you alone. Nobody sees it until you do one of two things.
Assign a specific driver
Sends that driver a request. The job is hidden from everyone else while they decide, for up to four hours, and never later than thirty minutes before pickup. If they do not accept in time it goes back to the marketplace automatically, provided you have that switched on.
You can send the request to somebody else at any point before it is accepted. Once a driver has accepted, take them off the job first, which notifies them, then assign the new driver.
Publish to the marketplace
Offers the job to every approved driver with a matching vehicle in the right country. They are notified by push and email and the first to accept gets it. Country is worked out from where the pickup actually is, not where your company is registered, so a London company's Paris job reaches drivers in France.
The statuses
| Status | Means |
|---|---|
| PENDING | Created, nobody can see it yet. |
| OPEN | On offer, waiting for a driver. |
| ASSIGNED | A driver has accepted it. |
| EN_ROUTE | Driver is on the way to the pickup. |
| ARRIVED | Driver is at the pickup. |
| PICKED_UP | Passenger is on board. |
| COMPLETED | Job done. |
| CANCELLED | Called off. May carry a cancellation fee depending on how close to pickup it was. |
Only the driver sets the four middle statuses, from their app. That is deliberate: the status means "the driver says so", and it would be worth nothing if dispatch could set it from the office.
Drivers
Before a driver can be sent any work they need three things: an approved profile, verified documents, and an approved vehicle of the class the job asks for. A driver with an approved SUV cannot be assigned a Jet Class job.
Onboarding collects the driving licence, private hire or operator licence, insurance and vehicle documents. They are stored privately and shown only to reviewers. Documents with expiry dates are tracked, so a licence that lapses takes the driver out of circulation rather than quietly going stale.
Drivers on the shared marketplace hold their own subscription. Drivers you employ directly are assigned work the same way.
On the day
- An hour before pickup the driver is reminded, by push, to set themselves en route. If the pickup is close and they still have not, they are reminded again more urgently.
- Live tracking starts when the driver goes en route and stops when the job ends. Their position is not collected off duty.
- The passenger is told when a driver is assigned and when they are on the way, with the driver's name, photo, car and registration.
- Meet and greet jobs generate a name board PDF, with your company logo above the passenger's name, ready to print or show on a tablet.
- Flight numbers on airport pickups let the driver track the arrival.
The driver never sees the customer's email address. They get the name, the phone number they need to call on the day, and the job detail, and nothing else.
Payments & invoicing
When a job is created with a price above zero and a customer email or phone number, the platform sends the customer a payment link automatically, by email and SMS, and records when it is paid. You do not have to do anything, and neither does your AI assistant.
Corporate accounts can be set to invoice rather than pay up front. Completed jobs produce invoices, and job and earnings exports come out as PDF or CSV.
Cancelling an assigned job close to pickup may raise a cancellation fee. A driver who cannot complete a job submits a cancellation request with evidence, which you review.
The iPhone app
The driver app is on the App Store. Drivers see the marketplace, accept work, set their status, navigate, and get push notifications for new jobs, assignment requests and pickup reminders.
Subscriptions bought in the app go through Apple; subscriptions bought on the website go through Stripe. Either way the driver's access is the same, and entitlement is kept in step automatically.
Your own AI assistant
You can connect Claude, ChatGPT or another AI assistant directly to your dispatch account, so you can ask it things in plain language instead of clicking through the dashboard. "What have I got on Thursday?" "Who is free for a Jet Class to Gatwick at six?" "Quote the Savoy to Heathrow for four people."
It acts as you, for your company only. It cannot see another company's work, and no assistant connected by one dispatcher can act as another.
The full reference, with every tool, data handling and troubleshooting, is on the connector page.
Connecting one
Go to Settings → Integrations → AI assistants and copy your connector URL, then:
- Claude: Customize → Connectors → Add custom connector → paste the URL.
- ChatGPT: Settings → Apps & Connectors → Advanced → Developer mode → Create → paste the URL.
- Claude Code:
claude mcp add --transport http chauffeur-vault <your URL>
You will be sent to Chauffeur Vault to sign in and approve the connection. You never share a password or an API key with the AI.
Then two more steps, on purpose
Signing in is not enough to let an assistant loose on your customer list.
- Approve it. The assistant appears in Settings → Integrations → AI assistants marked as waiting. Until you approve it there, it can read nothing and change nothing. You also get an email the moment anything connects as you.
- Allow changes, if you want it to make them. Every new connection starts read-only. It can look things up and that is all, until you switch it over.
Why the extra steps. An AI assistant signing in on your behalf is exactly the shape of a phishing attack: a convincing link, a real-looking sign-in page, one click. So one click is not enough here. If you ever get an email saying something connected to your account and it was not you, do nothing and it stays locked out.
What it can do
| Look up | Change |
|---|---|
| Jobs, and one job in full | Create a booking |
| The day's schedule and what is uncovered | Update a booking |
| Drivers and their vehicles | Publish to the marketplace |
| Customers and their history | Assign or swap a driver |
| Quotes and your rate card | Take a driver off a job |
| Agent calls, chats and transcripts | Cancel a booking |
What it deliberately cannot do
- Take payments. There is no tool for it. Payment links are sent by the platform automatically and an assistant cannot ask for card details or promise to take money.
- Change a job's status. Drivers do that, from their app.
- Touch your settings, pricing, drivers' accounts or anything belonging to another company.
- See a customer's email, phone or notes while browsing. Lists carry the name and the job; contact details come back only when it opens a specific booking for you.
Staying in control
Every single thing an assistant does is recorded, which assistant and which tool and what came of it, and shown in Settings → Integrations → AI assistants. Disconnect takes effect on its very next action, not whenever a token happens to expire. Company owners can see and disconnect every assistant connected to their company, and can switch assistants off for the whole company in one move.
Security
- Separation between companies is enforced in the database, not just the interface. You cannot query another company's jobs, drivers or customers.
- Passenger contact details are hidden from the marketplace and revealed only to the driver doing the job, and even then, not their email address.
- Driver documents live in a private store and are shown only to authorised reviewers.
- Credentials you give us for your own services are encrypted at rest.
- Everything sensitive is audited: who saw a passenger's details, who changed a job, what an AI assistant did.
Full detail of what we collect and why is in the privacy policy.
Getting help
See the support page, or email team@chauffeurvault.com. If it is about a specific booking, quote the job reference (the JOB-0000 number) and we can see its whole history.
Recent changes are listed on the updates page.