Corporate Taxi Policy Controls: How CabsOn Business Governs Every Ride

## How does CabsOn structure taxi policy controls? We structure policies as templates that you assign to staff, departments, or roles. A template is a bundle of rules covering spend, time, geography, and approvals. Rather than build rules one traveller at a time, you build a template once — say, "Junior Consultant" — and every graduate joining your consultancy inherits it automatically. When you want to change the daily cap for the whole graduate cohort, you edit one template and the change applies to every traveller in that group. Templates can be cloned, so a "Senior Consultant" template starts as a copy of "Junior Consultant" with higher caps and fewer approval requirements. A traveller can only ever be attached to one policy template at a time, which prevents the situation where competing rules disagree about the same booking. If a traveller's role changes mid-year, an administrator moves them from one template to another and the new rules apply from the next booking onward. ## Can I set spending limits per department, per person, and per ride? Yes — and all three run at once. A typical setup might look like this. Your Marketing department has a £3,000 monthly budget across everyone in the team. Within that, each individual traveller has their own £400 monthly allowance. Per ride, no single trip can exceed £50 unless an approver signs it off. When a traveller books a £45 ride, the system checks three counters at once: is the department under £3,000 this month, is this person under £400 this month, is this trip under £50. All three must pass for the ride to go ahead without approval. We show utilisation in real time on the Budgets page so a department owner can see they are 62 percent through the month with 47 percent of the budget spent, giving them time to raise the cap or tighten discretion before month-end. ## What approval workflows can I configure? You choose which trips require approval based on rules. Common configurations include: any single ride over £75, any airport transfer, any booking outside 07:00–20:00, any booking that would push the department over 90 percent of monthly budget, or any booking on behalf of an external guest. You can also require approval for specific staff members regardless of value — useful for probationary employees. When a rule fires, the traveller sees a "pending approval" state, and the nominated approver receives an email plus an in-portal notification. Approvers act with one click. If nobody responds within your configured window — commonly 30 minutes for same-day travel and 4 hours for scheduled bookings — the request auto-declines and the traveller is offered the option to amend the trip, escalate to a second approver, or pay personally. Multi-tier approvals are supported for large organisations. A £200 ride might need line-manager approval, and a £500 ride the department director on top of that. Each tier is logged separately. ## How do time and location restrictions work? Time windows are set per template as day-of-week and hour ranges. Sales staff might have no restriction. Office administrators might be restricted to weekday working hours. Out-of-hours event support might be restricted to Friday and Saturday evenings only. A traveller attempting to book outside their window sees the violation in the booking form before submission, with clear text explaining the restriction and, if configured, a link to request approval. Geofences use postcode zones and named locations. A common pattern for professional services firms is to whitelist the office postcode as a pickup zone and whitelist client sites, transport hubs, and hotel districts as drop-off zones. Trips that fall outside the whitelist either block or route to approval, depending on how you have configured the rule. We support both inclusion lists ("only these places") and exclusion lists ("anywhere except these places"). ## Can I limit who books taxis on behalf of guests? Yes. Booker permissions are separate from traveller permissions. On the Staff page, each account has two toggles — "can book for self" and "can book for others". A receptionist or executive assistant typically has both enabled, while an individual employee typically has only self-booking. When booking for others, the booker selects the traveller from a list, and guest travellers are named at booking with a phone number for driver contact. Every guest booking carries a sponsoring cost centre chosen at booking time, and that cost centre's policy limits apply. This means a receptionist cannot bypass departmental budgets by booking a lavish airport transfer for a director's guest under the general reception cost centre — the sponsoring department is chosen explicitly and its rules govern the trip. ## Do you offer policy templates for common business types? We provide starter templates for professional services, hospitality concierge, recruitment agencies, media and events, healthcare, and legal. Each template comes with defaults tuned to how those sectors typically operate. Hospitality concierge, for instance, defaults to unlimited guest bookings from a hotel postcode, wide geofences covering airports and stations, and per-ride caps rather than per-guest caps. Recruitment defaults to candidate-friendly booking from home postcodes to interview locations, with per-candidate budgets rather than per-user budgets. You clone a template as a starting point, then adjust caps and windows to match your organisation. Full setup for a mid-size business usually takes one administrator an afternoon. We do not charge for setup or onboarding. ## What does a policy violation actually look like to a traveller? We favour transparency over hidden blocks. When a traveller submits a booking that breaches policy, the form displays the specific rule and value — for example, "This trip is £67. Your per-ride cap is £50. Choose one of: amend the trip to reduce the fare, request approval from Aisha Patel, or pay personally and reclaim through expenses." Travellers know exactly why the booking is not going through and what their options are. We think silent blocks damage adoption. If a traveller cannot understand why their booking failed, they lose trust in the system and route around it — booking on their personal Uber account and expensing later, which is exactly what corporate policy is meant to prevent. ## How does this compare to Uber for Business and Bolt Business? Honestly: Uber for Business has broader global coverage and a mature expense-tool integration ecosystem, particularly with Concur and Expensify. If your business travels internationally on a weekly basis, that matters. Bolt Business has a very simple, low-friction monthly invoice model that appeals to small businesses who want minimal admin overhead. Where we compete strongly is granular policy depth in the UK. Our template system, department budgets, geofence controls, and multi-tier approvals are more configurable than either competitor's default offer, and our driver supply is UK-focused with UK-registered vehicles and drivers under UK licensing rules. We invoice as a UK VAT-registered supplier on a single monthly PDF with VAT itemised per ride, which some UK finance teams find cleaner for HMRC reconciliation than the multi-country invoicing arrangements used by larger global operators. If your travel is mostly domestic, mostly business-hours, and your finance team wants tight control with a single UK invoice, we are usually the right fit. If your travel is international and expense-tool integration matters more than policy granularity, one of the global operators may serve you better. We tell prospects this openly during onboarding conversations. ## What reporting comes with policy controls? Reports include booking volume, spend by department, spend by traveller, spend by client project or cost centre, average fare, peak-hour distribution, and policy-violation frequency. The policy-violation report is particularly useful — it shows which rules are firing most often and which travellers are running into them, which often points to a template that is too restrictive or a role that has outgrown its cap. Reports export to CSV and PDF from the Reports page, and month-end summaries can be scheduled to email automatically to a nominated finance contact.