How to Get Started With TransfersManager: Your First Week, Step by Step

The most common reason for staying one more year with WhatsApp and a spreadsheet isn't that they work well: it's not knowing how much time it will cost to move to something better. This article is the concrete answer, with what you do each day of the first week, not a list of features.

Before you start: what you need at hand

You don't need anything special to get going, but having this ready saves you going back and forth:

• The list of your vehicles (plate, make and model, seats, boot space) and which class each one belongs to (saloon, minivan, minibus...).
• Your drivers' details: name, phone number, and whether they'll use the app or just receive the job on WhatsApp while they get used to it.
• Your cost per kilometre and cost per driver hour, even as a first estimate. If you haven't worked them out yet, the full method with a worked example is in how to price an airport transfer without losing money.
• Whether you already have your own domain (yourfleet.com) for the booking website, or whether you'll use the one TransfersManager assigns you in the meantime.

Day 1: account, fleet and rates

1. Create the account. The Basic plan is free forever, up to 5 vehicles and 200 transfers a month, no credit card. It's an account you can genuinely operate with from day one, not a trial that expires.
2. Add your vehicles and group them by class (executive saloon, minivan, minibus). The class is what later decides which vehicle can cover which job and at what price.
3. Add your drivers with their usual shift. It doesn't have to be perfect: you adjust it every week.
4. Load your rates by zone and vehicle class. If you've been charging "by eye" depending on the route, this is the moment to turn that intuition into a table: real cost plus a target margin, not the competition's price minus a bit. The article above has the full formula with a Malaga-Marbella example.

By the end of day 1 you have your fleet, drivers and prices loaded. You haven't published anything customer-facing yet: that's day 2.

Days 2-3: your booking website and automatic dispatch

5. Publish the booking engine under your own domain. It isn't a landing page with a form that you answer by hand the next day: the passenger sees the price instantly, picks a vehicle class, one way or return, flight number and extras, and pays on the spot. Why this really matters for the bookings you lose today by being slow to reply is explained in why a contact form answered tomorrow can't compete with a live price.
6. Turn on automatic assignment. With the fleet and rates already loaded, every new booking is assigned on its own to the vehicle and driver that fit best, using six weighted criteria (coverage, proximity, workday density, fairness, driver preferences and profitability), with each candidate's score stored so it can be audited. The concrete signs that you already need it, instead of carrying on assigning by hand over WhatsApp, are in when a fleet outgrows WhatsApp and a spreadsheet.

Days 4-5: cover the gaps and get work from day one

Here is the most expensive mistake of starting out alone: waiting until you have a full client base of your own before you earn anything, or the opposite, accepting more jobs than the fleet can cover and running out of cars on an August Saturday.

7. Join the Dispatch Pool. It's a network of partner operators where you can hand off a job you can't cover in exchange for a 10 % acquisition commission (added to your plan's commission only when the job arrives or leaves through the Pool, never on your own clients), and also receive jobs from operators who are overloaded, even before you have a single client of your own. Both sides are explained in detail in sharing a ride with another operator and in work from day one: how a dispatch pool works for the receiving operator.

This is the step that changes the first week the most: you don't depend on your website getting traffic before you start invoicing.

Days 6-7: phone, invoicing and your first real job

8. Decide what to do about the last-minute call. If you have enough volume for the phone to be a problem (every driver will tell you when they can't pick up while driving), the voice agent quotes, confirms or hands the job to the Dispatch Pool on the same call, without you having to stop the car. The full case is in the phone you can't pick up; and if you want to hear it in action before turning it on for your fleet, our own agent, Javier, answers on +34 910 78 58 78 (the call is recorded).
9. Check invoicing. Every completed job generates its invoice, linked to the booking's lifecycle, with no need to reconstruct at month end what was charged and what wasn't.
10. Do your first real job with a client of your own, one from the Pool, or a test with a colleague. The goal of the first week isn't to have everything configured to the last detail, it's to have the whole circuit working once: booking, assignment, job, payment.

What can wait until the second week

You don't need to solve everything in the first seven days. These can wait at no cost: the native driver and passenger apps (more useful the bigger the fleet, not essential with two or three cars), formal agreements with hotels and agencies (explained in how to work with hotels and travel agencies without losing the customer), and a written no-show policy (you have one ready to copy in what to do when a passenger doesn't show up).

If you're coming from driving for a platform

If until now you've worked for Uber, Cabify or an aggregator and this is your jump to running your own company, the order of priorities changes a little: first the licence and the vehicle, then everything above. That whole path, including what nobody tells you before you invoice your first job, is in from driving for Uber to running your own transfer company.

What to look at before choosing a plan

The free Basic account more than covers the first week and the first months of a small fleet. When it pays to move up a plan (more vehicles, lower commission, full white label, priority in the Pool) depends on your volume, not on a fixed date: compare the four plans and what each one includes once you have real data from your first month, not before. And if you want to see the whole product working with sample data before taking the step, the live demo needs no sign-up and no card.

If you'd rather get an overview of the project before going through the step-by-step, get to know the TransfersManager project.