Fleet and Transport Dispatch Application

Fleet operators almost always end up running the money in Zoho and the movement in a spreadsheet. Customers, rates and enquiries sit in Zoho CRM. Invoices, fuel bills and driver advances sit in Zoho Books. Spare parts and tyres sit in Zoho Inventory. But the trip itself — the vehicle assigned, the driver who took it, the loading point, the diesel drawn en route, the toll receipts, the return leg, the odometer at both ends — lives in a workbook that one dispatcher owns and nobody else can read.

The consequences are predictable. Nobody can answer "did that trip make money?" without an afternoon of reconciliation. Driver payouts get argued over at month end because the advance ledger and the trip ledger are two different files. A truck goes for service two weeks late because the reminder was a note on a whiteboard. A permit expires and is discovered at a checkpoint rather than in a report.

Zoho ships no transport module. There is no trip object, no trip sheet, no fuel log, and no maintenance schedule tied to an odometer reading. This application is the operational layer that fills that gap and wires it back into the Zoho org you already pay for.

What ECOSIRE builds

A trip and dispatch board in Zoho Creator

The core is a Zoho Creator application with a Trip form as its spine: customer, route (origin, destination, via points), planned and actual dates, vehicle, primary and relief driver, freight basis and rate, and the trip's own pipeline — Planned, Assigned, Loaded, In Transit, Delivered, POD Received, Closed. A dispatch view puts unassigned trips beside available vehicles and drivers. Deluge validation blocks the assignments that cause disputes later: a vehicle already on an open trip, a driver whose licence or medical has expired, or a vehicle flagged off-road for maintenance simply cannot be picked.

Vehicle, driver and document registers

Vehicles carry make, model, registration, chassis and engine numbers, ownership type (owned, leased, attached or market vehicle), tare weight, payload capacity, tyre positions and current odometer. Drivers link to Zoho People employee records where you run it, or are held natively where you do not. Both carry a documents sub-form — registration, fitness, permit, insurance, pollution certificate, licence, medical — each with an expiry date driving a scheduled Deluge function that raises alerts ahead of time and, past expiry, marks the record unavailable for dispatch.

Fuel and expense capture

Fuel entries record date, vehicle, odometer, litres, rate, amount, station or own pump, and whether it was cash, card or credit. Deluge computes kilometres run and mileage per entry and per trip, and flags entries whose consumption falls outside the tolerance you set — the usual way pilferage becomes visible. Trip expenses (toll, weighbridge, loading, unloading, driver advance) post against the trip and can be pushed to Zoho Books as expenses or vendor bills through the Books REST API, so the accounting side stays real rather than reconstructed.

Maintenance and tyres

Every vehicle gets preventive maintenance schedules on both dimensions that matter: distance and time. Service due at odometer intervals, insurance and fitness due on dates. A scheduled function reads the latest odometer entry each night and opens a Work Order when a threshold is crossed. Work orders capture job type, garage (in-house or external), parts consumed, labour, downtime and cost, and draw parts from Zoho Inventory so consumption reduces real stock. Tyres are tracked by serial and wheel position with rotation and retread history.

Per-trip profitability

The number the whole system exists to produce. Freight revenue on the trip, minus fuel apportioned to it, minus trip expenses, minus a maintenance and depreciation provision per kilometre that you define, minus driver payout. Reports roll this up by vehicle, route, customer, driver and month, so a loss-making lane is visible rather than suspected.

Integration with the rest of your Zoho org

• Zoho CRM — trips originate from a Contact, Account or Deal; a custom function writes trip status and delivery confirmation back to the CRM record so the commercial team sees it without asking.
• Zoho Books — freight invoices raised from closed trips through the Books REST API, against the correct Books organization, with customer, item, place of supply and GST or VAT treatment applied; vendor bills for external garages and fuel credit accounts.
• Zoho Inventory — parts issue on work orders against real stock and real valuation.
• Zoho People — driver master, leave and attendance where you run it.
• Zoho Flow — the connective tissue for anything event-driven on top: an SMS or email to the consignee on delivery, a Zoho Cliq post when a vehicle goes off-road, a webhook to your telematics provider.

Mobile capture

Zoho Creator's mobile app gives drivers a stripped-down form set: start trip with odometer and photo, log fuel, upload POD, close trip. Offline entries sync when the device reconnects. There is no separate app to install and no per-driver licence beyond your Zoho seats.

Who it is for

Road freight and full-truckload operators, LTL and parcel fleets, tanker and bulk hauliers, bus and staff-transport contractors, rental and equipment-movement firms, and distribution businesses that run their own delivery fleet rather than outsourcing it. It suits an operator running roughly ten to a few hundred vehicles, already committed to Zoho, and currently keeping trip data in spreadsheets or a book.

How delivery works

1. Scoping call. We walk through your current trip sheet, your rate structure (per trip, per tonne, per kilometre, per day), how you pay drivers, and which Zoho apps you already run. We look at your Zoho Books organization and tax configuration so invoicing is right the first time. 2. Fixed quote. You receive a written scope with the exact form and field list, the integration points, the reports, and a fixed price. No hourly billing and no scope drift. 3. Build. We develop the Creator application, the Deluge validation and scheduled functions, the CRM, Books and Inventory integrations, the mobile forms and the reports. 4. Install in a test environment. Deployed into your sandbox or a test Creator environment against a Books test organization, loaded with your own sample trips, vehicles and rates. You test with real routes before anything touches live data. 5. Production go-live. Promoted into your live Zoho org, with master data (vehicles, drivers, routes, customers, rate cards) imported, users and roles set, and dispatchers and drivers trained. 6. Support window. A defined post-go-live support period for fixes and adjustments, with all Deluge source and configuration handed over so you are never locked in.

Honest scope

This is built to order. Nothing here is a pre-packaged download and there is no trial version, because the application does not exist until we build yours — the field names, statuses, rate logic and payout rules follow your operation rather than a generic template. Typical lead time is two to four weeks from signed quote to a working test environment, depending on how many integration points are in scope. GPS and telematics feeds can be integrated where your device provider exposes an API; that is confirmed during scoping, not assumed. You keep the code.