QLD Booked Hire Reporting: A Guide for Authorised Booking Entities

1. Who This Applies To

This guide is written for Queensland operators. If you're weighing up dispatch software more generally, our taxi and limousine use case covers how booked hire fleets run bookings, fares and account invoicing day to day.

Queensland regulates booked hire and taxi services under the Transport Operations (Passenger Transport) Act 1994 and its regulation. If you arrange bookings for booked hire trips — whether the work is done in a booked hire vehicle, a limousine or a taxi — you are an authorised booking entity, and you hold a Booking Entity Authorisation.

That authorisation comes with data-keeping and reporting obligations. Separately, taxi service operators — businesses providing rank and hail services — report on the rank and hail trips they provide. Many operators are both, and report on both.

Reporting is submitted through TMR's BEAR system. Operators are asked for information about the booked hire trips they arranged, broken down by the suburb or locality where each trip started.

2. What Gets Reported

There are two shapes of reporting to be aware of, and they are not the same thing:

• The annual return — a workbook you complete and submit for the financial year, covering the volume of booked hire trips (and, where applicable, rank and hail trips) broken down by locality.
• The AdHoc trip report — a detailed, trip-by-trip data extract. This is the granular record of individual trips: when each was booked, where it started and finished, who drove it, in what vehicle, and what was charged.

The practical relationship between them matters: the annual return is an aggregate, but you cannot produce a trustworthy aggregate without the underlying trip data. Operators who keep clean per-trip records can produce either on demand. Operators who don't end up reconstructing a year of work from driver memory, bank statements and paper run sheets.

TMR publishes the current templates and requirements on their booking entity authorisation pages. Always work from their current version — formats are revised from time to time.

3. The Trip Data You Need on Every Job

The trip-level report asks for roughly twenty fields per trip. Grouped by what they actually mean for your operation:

Identity and timing

• A unique trip ID — every trip needs a reference you can trace back to a complete record
• When the booking was made — the date and time the booking was taken, not when the trip ran
• The booked pick-up time — when the trip was scheduled to depart
• Actual pick-up and drop-off times — when the trip really happened

Where the trip went

• Pick-up and drop-off latitude and longitude — coordinates, not just an address string
• Pick-up and drop-off suburb — the locality breakdown the annual return is built on

Who did the work

• Driver authority number — the driver's authorisation, not their licence number
• Vehicle registration plate
• Service licence number — attached to the vehicle

What was charged, and what didn't happen

• Fare estimate and fare total — what was quoted against what was actually charged
• Fare surcharge — amounts added on top of the metered fare
• Whether the service was requested but not provided — cancellations and no-shows are part of the picture, not omissions from it
• Whether the trip was a Taxi Subsidy Scheme trip

Note what this list implies. Coordinates mean an address typed as free text isn't enough. Actual times mean you need a record of what really happened, not just what was scheduled. And cancelled trips being reportable means deleting a cancelled job from your system destroys reportable data.

4. The Three Identifiers That Trip People Up

Most of a trip report is generated from ordinary operational data. Three fields are different, because they are regulatory identifiers that live outside the trip itself — and they are the usual reason a return can't be filed on time:

1. Your Booking Entity Authorisation number — one per business, straightforward.
2. Each driver's authority number — one per driver. This is not their driver licence number, and the two are often confused. If you engage subcontract drivers, this is the field most likely to be missing.
3. Each vehicle's service licence number — one per vehicle. Easily missed on a vehicle brought into the fleet mid-year, or on a temporary replacement.

These are worth capturing at onboarding — when a driver starts or a vehicle enters your fleet — rather than at reporting time. Chasing a driver who left six months ago for their authority number is a bad week.

5. Fatigue Data

Alongside trip data, operators may be asked for fatigue-related data: each driver's authority number paired with their app log-on and log-off times. This is a different kind of record from a rostered shift — it's when the driver was actually available and working through the booking app, rather than when they were scheduled to be.

Worth identifying early which of these your operation captures, because log-on events can't be reconstructed retrospectively. This reporting is separate from your broader fatigue obligations around driver hours and rest breaks, which apply regardless of what gets reported — see our driver fatigue compliance guide for those.

6. Keeping Records Clean Year-Round

The operators who find reporting painless are not the ones with the best spreadsheet at year end. They're the ones whose day-to-day dispatch captures the reportable fields as a byproduct. A few habits that make the difference:

• Capture identifiers at onboarding — driver authority and vehicle service licence numbers recorded on day one, not chased later
• Book with real addresses — addresses resolved to coordinates at booking time, so location data exists without anyone thinking about it
• Cancel, don't delete — a cancelled trip is reportable data; deleting it removes a row you're expected to file
• Record actual times — whether through drivers confirming stops in an app or dispatchers closing jobs, something has to timestamp what really happened
• Run the report early — pull a quarter's data well before anything is due. Errors found in October are administrative; errors found in the final week are a crisis
• Keep your own copy — the obligation rests with you, so your records should be exportable in full, independent of any one software vendor

7. How Software Helps

Dispatch software that already holds bookings, drivers, vehicles and fares has nearly everything the trip report asks for. What it needs to add is the regulatory framing:

• Somewhere to store the three identifiers — against the organisation, the driver and the vehicle respectively
• An export built to the regulator's template — matching their column order and wording, so the file loads into the submission workbook without reformatting
• Completeness checks — telling you which trips are missing a driver authority or service licence number before you file, not after
• Correct period logic — reporting a trip by when it was booked to depart, so advance bookings land in the right period
• Historical integrity — trips run by drivers or vehicles since removed from the fleet must still report correctly, because returns are filed after the fact

Done properly, the return stops being an annual project and becomes an export.

8. Readiness Checklist

Use this to sanity-check where you stand before your next return:

• Your Booking Entity Authorisation number is recorded in your system, not just on a certificate in a drawer
• Every active driver has their authority number recorded
• Every vehicle in service has its service licence number recorded
• Bookings capture pick-up and drop-off coordinates, not just typed addresses
• Actual pick-up and drop-off times are recorded for completed trips
• Cancelled and declined trips are retained rather than deleted
• Fares distinguish the estimate, the total, and any surcharge
• Taxi Subsidy Scheme trips are identifiable
• You can produce a trip-level extract for an arbitrary date range today, without a data project
• You've run a trial export well ahead of the deadline

Reporting is rarely hard because the report is hard. It's hard because the data wasn't captured at the time, and by then the trip is a memory.

This guide is general information for transport operators, not legal or regulatory advice, and Waybill is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Department of Transport and Main Roads. Requirements change — always work from TMR's current published templates and guidance, and seek your own advice about your obligations.