Trip Connect
LiveField trips from first request to final invoice
Takes a field trip from the teacher's request through costing, approval, driver confirmation, and out the other side as an invoice against the right budget.
The problem
One field trip involves a teacher, an office administrator, a transportation supervisor, a driver, and eventually somebody in finance. Traditionally it also involves an email thread connecting the first four, a phone call to work out the cost, and a quiet hope that the driver has read the note about tomorrow’s 7am departure.
The visible failure is thirty children standing in a car park while somebody makes phone calls. The invisible one is worse: the trip happened, nobody recorded the wait time, and the school was billed for the wrong amount six weeks later — or not at all.
What Trip Connect does
Requesting. Trips are requested through a form and costed automatically from the actual route: distance, travel time, and driver hours. Multi-stop journeys and separate outbound and return legs are first-class, because a real trip is rarely one line between two points. Route options can be compared before one is committed to. Wheelchair access, aides, and special equipment are recorded on the trip rather than in the notes field, where they get missed.
Dispatching. Approved trips go out to drivers as offers they accept or decline by text, and the replies are recorded against the trip without anyone transcribing them. The day before, an automated reminder asks the assigned driver to confirm.
Those two things are deliberately tracked apart. Agreeing to a trip three weeks out and confirming you are driving it tomorrow morning are different facts, and conflating them is how a bus fails to arrive.
Billing. When the trip is done, the invoice comes out of what actually happened — hours driven, wait time, and any adjustments — priced by configurable charge types with minimums and per-unit rates, and posted against the right account and budget number. Invoices and trip sheets export as PDFs.
That last part is the difference between a dispatch tool and a system the business runs on: the trip and the money that follows it are the same record, so the billing is not a separate act of remembering.
How it is built
Laravel 13, Livewire, and MySQL. SMS offers and inbound replies run through Twilio; route solving and distance come from the Esri ArcGIS platform; invoices and trip sheets are generated as PDFs, with spreadsheet exports for finance and calendar links for the people driving. Drivers can also work from the tablet app, Driver Connect.