A free Excel transfer dispatch template. And the four places it breaks.
A real working file, not a gated stub: bookings, fleet, a dispatch board that catches an over-capacity run and a double-booked vehicle on sight, printable manifests, hotel zones and a margin column. Take it and use it. Then, if it is useful, read the honest account of where it stops.
It opens on a worked sample day — one airport, twelve runs, a dozen invented hotels — with one over-capacity run and one double-booked vehicle already in it, so you can watch the checks fire before you trust them with your own day.
Seven sheets, one day of airport work
Anything on a pale grey background is a formula and looks after itself. Everything else is yours to overwrite. That is the whole convention.
Read me
What the file is, how to work it, and what it will not do. In plain language.
Zones
Your hotel-to-zone lookup. Everything else reads from here, so a hotel you have not listed is flagged rather than quietly left blank.
Fleet
Vehicles, seats, drivers, subcontractors and whether each is charged per run or per kilometre.
Bookings
The day's work as the agencies sent it. Date, reference, flight, pax, hotel, agency. The zone fills itself in.
Dispatch board
The working sheet. One row per run, and the two checks that make the file worth opening.
Manifest
Pick a run; the passenger list, vehicle, driver and pax total build themselves. Set up to print.
Costs
A rate card, per-run and per-km supplier cost for every run, and a margin column that goes red when a run loses money.
Two conflicts, caught on sight
These are the two mistakes that cost a real morning. The template genuinely catches both — in plain Excel formulas you can read and change.
More pax than seats
The board sums the pax booked onto each run and compares it to the seats on the assigned vehicle. When the sum goes over, the whole row turns red. In the sample day, run R05 carries ten people on an eight-seat van, because one booking was added after the board was built. That is exactly how it happens.
One vehicle, two runs, same time
Every run holds a vehicle between a start and an end time. If the same vehicle is held on two runs whose times overlap by even a minute, both rows turn red. In the sample day, runs R08 and R09 both hold V-03 between 14:50 and 15:40.
Change a time, swap a vehicle or add a passenger and the colour follows immediately. Clear the two conflicts and the board goes green. Put them back and the red returns — the formatting is driven by the numbers, not painted on.
Twenty minutes to your own day
- Zones first. List every hotel you serve and the zone it sits in. Everything downstream reads from here.
- Then Fleet. Vehicles, seats, drivers, and per-run or per-km. The seat count is what the capacity check measures against.
- Paste the bookings in. Date, flight, pax, hotel, agency. The zone column fills itself.
- Build the runs. One row per run on the Dispatch board, with a vehicle and the times it is held. Then put the Run ID against each booking that is riding on it.
- Print the manifest. Pick a run in the shaded cell; the passenger list builds itself.
- Starting from empty. Delete the sample values, not the rows. The formula columns are already stretched down the sheet, waiting.
Four places it breaks
Not four reasons your spreadsheet is bad. It has probably run your seasons for years and it has earned that. Four specific things a file on a disk cannot do, which you will meet in roughly this order as the operation grows.
Two dispatchers, one file
The file sits on a shared drive, or it went round as an attachment. Two people have it open on a Tuesday morning in July. One puts the 11:20 on the partner van. The other, working in their copy, gives the same van to the 11:40. Both save. The second save wins, completely and silently — no warning, no merge, no record that the first version ever said anything different.
The checks in the workbook are honest about the file in front of you. They cannot see the copy on someone else’s screen, and they have no way to know one exists. Cloud co-authoring genuinely softens this, if everyone stays in the same online copy — which holds until the first person downloads it to work on the way to the airport, and then you are back where you started with two files that both look right.
Most operators find this out the first time a vehicle turns up somewhere nobody was expecting it.
The flight moves and the paper does not
KX 188 slips ninety minutes. You update the board. The run times shift, the capacity check re-runs, and everything on your screen is correct again. That part works.
But the manifest for that run was printed at six and is in a driver’s hand. The message you sent the guide at seven still has the old time in it. The agency has the old sheet in their inbox. The workbook cannot reach any of them, and — this is the part that bites — it does not know it needs to. It has no idea it was ever printed, read, or forwarded.
A spreadsheet keeps its own cells current. Getting a change to the people who already acted on the old value is manual work, every single time, and it is the first work that gets skipped on the day it matters most.
When the sheet and the plan disagree, there is nothing to check
An agency insists they sent the pax change on Thursday. Your sheet does not have it. Who is right?
The file knows only what it says now. It cannot tell you what it said on Thursday, who changed that booking from four to six, or whether the run was ever on a different vehicle. Excel’s own version history helps a little, if the file lives in OneDrive or SharePoint and nobody has emailed a copy around — but that gives you file snapshots, not an answer to who changed this booking, when, and why. You are reduced to scrolling back through a shared mailbox.
So the argument stays unresolvable. And unresolvable arguments with agencies get settled by whoever is more insistent, not by whoever is right.
It ends at the office door
The workbook covers the desk very well. It does not cover the driver standing at the hotel with two of six passengers not in the lobby. Or the guide who needed to know a wheelchair was coming. Or the rep selling an excursion at the desk with no idea the coach is already full.
None of those people can open the file. If they could, you would not want them editing it. So the field runs on phone calls and WhatsApp, and what actually happened comes back to the office hours later, spoken down a phone, to be typed in a second time by someone who was not there.
The spreadsheet is not the problem here. It just stops at the door, and the rest of the day happens on the other side of it.
The same board, without the four
Meridian OS runs that board as one live record instead of a file, so the capacity and vehicle checks are computed against what everyone can see at once, and every version of a manifest is kept rather than reprinted — when the plan changes, the manifest reissues itself and the driver’s run sheet changes with it. Drivers, guides and reps work inside the same record from their own phones, so the field stops being a separate system held together by phone calls.
The template above stays free either way. If it carries you through another three seasons, that is a good outcome.