A console built for the browser, a live dispatch board, vehicle artwork in your colour, and BetterParking opens
Run your business from a rebuilt console that loads ten times faster, watch every booking on a live dispatch board, give each service class a vehicle in your own colour, and sign up for BetterParking today.
Three weeks on from the last update, 630 changes have landed, and most of them went into one place: the console you run your business from. It has been rebuilt for the browser, it loads ten times faster, and it has a live dispatch board the old one could not have had. Around it, service classes get their own artwork, traffic split finds the dispatch setup that suits your city, and BetterParking is open to anyone who wants to sign up.
A console built for the browser
We are retiring the web console you have been signing into and replacing it with one built for the browser from the start. It lives at the same address, under the same sign-in, and it is the one you are using now.
The first thing you will notice is the wait, or the lack of one. The console is 6.6 times smaller to download — 1.3 MB against 8.6 MB — and ten times faster to load: 1.6 seconds against 16.6.
It is also a console you can drive from the keyboard. Press ⌘K to jump to any page or record. Move down a list with J and K, open a row with Enter, and press ? for the shortcuts available on the page you are on. The dispatch room and the brand studio fold down to fit a phone, so checking on the day no longer needs a laptop.
Every booking that needs you, on one board
The dispatch room now opens on a Live Board: your active bookings on one side and your drivers on a live map on the other.
Bookings are grouped by what they need rather than by when they arrived — waiting for a driver, on the way or in trip, scheduled in the next two hours, and open. A ride that has waited too long or failed to find a driver is marked as needing attention, so the one booking that is going wrong is at the top instead of somewhere in a list. Select a ride and the map frames its whole route, hides the other drivers, and draws the trail the car has actually driven as it moves.
Taking a booking for someone on the phone is one tab away, on the same screen.
Lists that do more than list
Every list in the console now works the same way. Filter with chips you can combine — several countries at once, a date range, a status — and sort by any column. The whole row opens the record, and a right-click gives you its actions, a link to copy, and a new tab to open it in.
Pin the customers, drivers and bookings you keep coming back to, and they stay at the top of their list and in the sidebar. Lists with two levels unfold in place: the service catalogue shows each category with its services underneath, and each region opens to show its zones.
Forms no longer have a Save button to forget. A change is saved as you make it, and something you were in the middle of creating is kept as a draft until you come back to it.
A vehicle for every service class, in your colour
Setting up a ride tier used to mean finding or commissioning a picture for it. Now you pick one. The console has a catalogue of twelve vehicles — sedan, SUV, pickup, van, box truck, scooter, delivery scooter, tuk-tuk, boat, helicopter, bicycle and kick scooter — and each one can be painted any colour you choose.
Every vehicle comes in two views. One is the image your riders see when they choose a class. The other is the same vehicle seen from directly above, which is how drivers of that class are drawn on your live map — in your colour while they are free, and in amber while they are busy. You see the result before you save it, and uploading your own artwork still works exactly as it did.
It is one less thing between signing up and having an app that looks like yours.
Find the dispatch that fits your city
BetterSuite runs in cities that have very little in common, and the way rides are offered to drivers has to suit each of them. What works in a dense city centre does not work across a spread-out suburb, and what drivers expect differs from one culture to the next. Sometimes the best answer is a combination of several approaches.
Finding that answer used to mean trying one approach after another on everyone, with your riders' experience paying for each attempt. Traffic split does it for you: run several dispatch configurations side by side, give each a share of your rides, and see which one serves your riders and drivers best.
If you would like help setting it up, contact support — we will configure a few approaches that work well for your region.
BetterParking is open
BetterParking is open. There is no waiting list any more — sign up, choose parking as your business, and start your trial today.
You get your own parking marketplace under your own brand: space owners list their lots, drivers find and book them in your app, and you run it all from the console.
Signing up asks what you run and where
Sign-up used to open on a choice of plan. It now asks the two things that shape your platform — what you run and where you run it — and tells you plainly what the plan costs and whether a card is needed today. The page is half the length it was.
You are also billed in your own money from the first invoice: pounds if you register in the United Kingdom, euros across the euro countries, dollars elsewhere.
Around the product
- Orders — every order now carries a short numeric code, the same one in the console and in the apps, so it can be read out over the phone.
- Platform — updates now roll out without interrupting a request in flight, so an improvement arriving in the middle of your day no longer costs anyone a retry.
- Website — side-by-side comparisons of BetterTaxi with TaxiCaller, iCabbi, Cab9 and Autocab.