Corporate Taxi Spending Limits: Monthly Caps & Approval Workflows

How do CabsOn corporate spending limits actually work? Every CabsOn business account has a Budgets section inside the admin portal. You can create three types of cap: an account-wide monthly limit (the ceiling for the whole business), department caps (for example, Sales gets 4,000 pounds a month, Recruitment gets 1,200), and per-user caps (individual employees who need a personal ceiling, often used for contractors or new hires still on probation). All caps are calendar-monthly by default, resetting at 00:00 on the 1st of each month in UK local time. Each cap has its own approver, its own utilisation dashboard, and its own alert thresholds. When an employee logs in and requests a quote, our booking engine checks the fare estimate against every applicable cap: their personal cap if they have one, their department cap, and the account-wide cap. If the booking sits comfortably inside all three, it confirms instantly and dispatches to the fleet. If any single cap would be breached, we hold the booking as "Pending Approval" and notify the approvers by email and portal alert. The employee sees exactly why the booking was held ("This ride would take your department to 103 percent of its monthly cap"), so they understand it is not a system fault. ## Can I set different spending limits per department? Yes. Department-level caps are the most common configuration we see, and they map directly onto the cost centres you already use in your accounting software. Inside the Departments page, you create a department (Marketing, Legal, Client Services, whatever labels you use internally), assign staff to it, and give it a monthly cap in pounds. Every ride booked by a member of that department counts against the department budget, regardless of who booked it or where they went. We support unlimited departments per account, and any employee can belong to more than one — useful for senior staff whose journeys are legitimately split across two cost centres. In that case, the booker picks which department to charge at the point of booking, and the cap check runs against whichever they chose. The monthly PDF invoice we send on the 1st of each month itemises every ride by department, so your finance team can reconcile against your general ledger without a manual sort. ## What happens when an employee tries to book above the cap? The booking does not silently fail and it does not silently confirm. It moves to a "Pending Approval" state, visible to the employee in their own bookings list and to every nominated approver in the shared Approvals queue at business.cabson.uk. Approvers see the fare estimate, the pickup and drop-off, the passenger, the department being charged, the current cap utilisation, the reason the employee gave (a free-text field), and a one-click Approve or Decline button. Approve: the booking is released to the fleet immediately. Dispatch happens in the same second. The employee receives a confirmation email and the driver assignment appears in the app as normal. Decline: the booking is cancelled with a stated reason. The employee is notified by email and can either revise the journey (shorter route, standard rather than executive class) or, in genuine business-critical cases, escalate the request. We do not charge cancellation fees on approval declines — the ride was never dispatched to a driver. Approvers can also configure auto-approve rules to save time on obvious cases: "auto-approve any airport transfer under 80 pounds for the Sales department" is a common pattern for accounts with heavy travel. ## How does real-time cap tracking appear to the employee booking the ride? The booking screen in business.cabson.uk shows a live utilisation strip at the top of the quote step. It reads something like "Marketing: 2,140 pounds used of 3,000 pound March cap (71 percent). This booking will bring you to 74 percent." The number is calculated in real time from confirmed and completed rides in the current calendar month. If a colleague in the same department books a ride five seconds before, your utilisation bar reflects that immediately. We do this on purpose. Most travel software hides budget data from the person doing the booking, on the theory that only finance needs to see it. In practice, that just means the person actually spending the money is the last person told there is a problem. Showing utilisation at the point of decision is the single biggest lever we have found for reducing overspend. Employees consistently make different choices when they can see the number moving. ## Can I set separate spending limits for individual employees? Yes, and this is where we see two common use cases. First, contractors and interim staff who have limited authorisation while they are new. A recruitment agency, for instance, might give a new consultant a personal cap of 400 pounds a month for candidate collection until they have been in role for 90 days. Second, senior staff who legitimately book outside normal patterns — a partner at a law firm, a hotel general manager — where the department cap would be too restrictive and the account-wide cap is too broad. Personal caps sit alongside department caps, not instead of them; both are checked and the tighter of the two applies. Personal caps also have their own approver route. You can point a specific individual's escalations to a specific approver rather than the department default, useful when an executive assistant should approve their principal's overages rather than a finance team member. ## What data does the corporate spending limit dashboard show? Inside the Budgets page at business.cabson.uk, we surface: current-month utilisation for every cap (account, each department, each user with a personal cap), a trailing 12-month utilisation chart per cap, the number of bookings held for approval in the current month, average approval turnaround time, and a list of the top five drivers of cost by department. You can export any of these views as CSV or PDF for board reporting. We also send scheduled alerts. By default, every cap owner receives an email at 50 percent utilisation, 80 percent utilisation, and 100 percent utilisation each month. You can turn those off or add more thresholds (60, 75, 90) as needed. Alerts are useful because they force a mid-month check-in rather than a surprise on the 1st. ## Are spending limits compatible with our existing corporate travel policy? Almost always yes. Spending limits are a mechanical control on top of your written policy, not a replacement for it. If your policy says "economy class taxis for city journeys under six miles", we can enforce the vehicle class rule alongside the monthly cap. If your policy says "no bookings between 22:00 and 05:00 without line manager sign-off", we can route those specific bookings into the same approval workflow that handles cap overages. The Budgets and Approvals modules were built to be composable — you decide which rules trigger the workflow. We do not, and honestly cannot, know your policy for you. We offer a policy-review call as part of onboarding where our team goes through your current written policy with your travel manager and translates it into cap settings, department structures, approval routes, and auto-approve rules. This usually takes about 90 minutes and is included in all annual plans. ## How does spending limit enforcement affect the driver and the ride quality? It does not. Once a booking is confirmed — whether that was instant or after approval — the driver sees a standard job in their app with no indication of cap status, approval history, or department. Approved bookings dispatch through the same fleet, same vehicle standards, same service level agreements as any other ride. Drivers are paid the same. The only difference is what happened in the seconds before dispatch, and that is invisible to them. We think this matters. Corporate accounts sometimes worry that flagged bookings will be treated as lower priority. They are not. From the moment approval clears, an approved-after-hold booking is indistinguishable from an instantly-confirmed one.