If you're a trade plate driver, you already know the bit nobody warns you about. The driving is the easy part. It's everything around the driving that grinds you down: the sheets, the mileage, the receipts, the payslips that turn up weeks later covering thirty jobs at once.
Most drivers do the same thing. A notes app for job numbers. Photos of the odometer buried in the camera roll. Receipts stuffed in the door pocket. A spreadsheet they swear they'll keep on top of and never do. And every few weeks, a remittance lands and they have to work out, from memory, whether the numbers on it are right.
The problem isn't the driving. It's the paperwork.
Here's what makes this job different from almost any other contract work: you are paid per movement, by someone else's arithmetic, weeks after you did the work.
- ✕A statement arrives covering dozens of jobs at once, often a month after you drove them.
- ✕Job numbers on the payslip don't always look like the ones on your sheet.
- ✕Waiting time, inspection payments and travel expenses are all mixed into the same column.
- ✕Excess mileage is calculated on rates you have to remember yourself.
- ✕By the time you spot something missing, you've done another eighty jobs.
None of that is an accident of bad luck. It's just how the system is set up, so the effect is the same either way: the person with the least time and the fewest tools is the one expected to check the maths. You're a contractor. Nobody is auditing your pay for you. If a job quietly doesn't appear on a statement, the only person who will ever notice is you. And only if you kept a record good enough to prove it.
That's the real problem. It isn't about being cheated. It's that you genuinely cannot tell. And when you can't tell, you accept whatever number lands in your account and get on with the next job.
So we built the thing that didn't exist.
We looked for an app first. There are mileage trackers, generic invoicing tools, delivery apps built for couriers. Not one of them knew what a trade plate job actually is: a collection, a delivery, a reg, a set of plates, an inspection, waiting time, and a payment that shows up weeks later under a job number.
So TrackDrive got built to fill that gap, designed around real jobs, real sheets and real payslips. Every screen exists because of a specific moment where the current way of doing it was rubbish.
- ✓Share the job sheet straight from your email. No typing. The reg, route, postcodes and times are read off it for you.
- ✓Every job carries its expected pay (base, excess mileage, inspect & collect, waiting time) worked out on your rates the moment it's created.
- ✓Share the payslip in the same way. TrackDrive matches every line against your jobs and flags anything that doesn't add up.
- ✓Check any vehicle before you collect it: live DVLA data and the full MOT history from the plate.
- ✓Evidence where it belongs. Photos and videos captured at collection and delivery, stored against that job, ready if anything is ever disputed.
The first of its kind
There is no other app that does DVLA checks, job sheet imports, remittance matching, waiting time and expense tracking in one place, built around how trade plate work actually runs. Not because it's a clever idea nobody had. The people who had the idea simply weren't the ones writing software.
What changes when you can actually see it
The point was never to fight anyone. It's that when a payslip lands, you already know what it should say. Every job you did is sitting there with its expected pay attached. Match them up, and the ones that don't line up are on screen in seconds instead of lost in a month of memory.
Some drivers find nothing wrong and just get their evenings back. Others find a job that quietly never got paid. Both are the same win: you stop guessing.
TrackDrive is £3.99 a month with a 7-day free trial. One plan, everything included, cancel whenever you like. It's priced so that catching a single missed job pays for the year several times over. And honestly, if it never catches anything, the hour a week you stop losing to admin is worth it on its own.
If you do this job and something here is missing, tell us. A lot of what's in TrackDrive now came from drivers saying "it should do this". That's exactly how it keeps getting better.
— Abdurrahman
Founder, TrackDrive