About TMS Drive

Transport Made Simple runs bus services across the Midlands and East Anglia. Running them means allocating several hundred duties a day to the colleagues who drive them, recording when those colleagues start and finish, and paying them for the hours they worked.

TMS Drive is the system that does that. Depot planners and managers use the web side of it. The TMS Drive app is the part that goes in a driving colleague's pocket: their own duties, their own clocking, their own leave, their own hours, and nothing belonging to anybody else.

It replaces a paper duty card, a phone call to the depot and a wait until payday to find out whether the hours were right. That is the whole ambition. It is a working tool for about seven hundred colleagues, not a product with customers.

The app is only for colleagues of the Transport Made Simple group. It is not a service for the travelling public, there is nothing in it to buy, and there is no way to create an account for yourself.

Accounts are issued, not registered. A colleague exists in the app only because they exist in TMS Insights, the group HR system, and because their depot has added them to the app. Typing an email address the group does not hold gets you a polite message and no account, on purpose: the sign in screen would otherwise be a free way of finding out who drives for us.

So if you have arrived here from the App Store listing and you do not work for us, the app will not let you in and there is nothing you have done wrong. There is genuinely nothing in it for you.

Four things. This is the whole list, and nothing here is planned rather than built.

Your duties

The duties allocated to you, the ones coming up and the ones you have worked. Each one shows the date, the duty number, sign on and sign off times, your depot, the routes, the breaks, both halves of a split shift, and the vehicle allocated to it where there is one. You see your own and only your own: a duty belonging to somebody else cannot be reached, however it is asked for.

Clocking on and off

You clock in at the start of a duty and out at the end, from your phone, at the depot. Your location is checked at those two moments so that a clock in from somewhere other than the depot is a question somebody can ask rather than a fact nobody holds. Our server makes that decision, never the app, and it records the distance it measured and the radius that was in force at the time.

Clocking in opens fifteen minutes before your sign on time. If the app says no, whether you are too far away, too early, have no duty today or the location fix was too old, the attempt is still recorded with the reason. That is deliberate and it is usually in your favour: a refused attempt at 05:38 is something your depot can see and correct, where a discarded one looks identical to never having tried.

Leave and absence

You can ask for annual leave, which goes to your line manager to approve or refuse, and you can see how much of your entitlement is left. You can report sickness, unpaid leave or another absence, which is recorded rather than approved, because nobody approves having been ill. You can withdraw a leave request you made yourself, which used to be a phone call to the depot about a mistake that took ten seconds to make.

Your hours

Week by week, built from what you actually clocked, with each day showing the duty, the time in, the time out and the total. A day you never clocked out of is flagged rather than quietly totalled, because that is the one you can still get fixed before it reaches payroll. These hours are for your own checking. Your payslip comes from the payroll team, not from this screen.

Worth saying plainly, because several of these are what people assume first.

• It does not track you. Location is read at the moment you press clock in and the moment you press clock out, and at no other time. Not during the duty, not in the background, not when the app is closed.
• It does not know where the bus is. Nothing in the app follows a vehicle.
• It holds no pay rate and no bank details, and no National Insurance number and no date of birth. Approved hours go to the HR system, which is what feeds payroll. The app itself never talks to payroll.
• It shows you nobody else's roster, hours, leave or absence.
• There is no advertising, no analytics and no tracking product in the app or in this website, and nothing about you is sold to anybody.
• It is nothing to do with bus times, tickets or refunds. If you are a passenger, this app cannot help you and neither can anybody reading its support mailbox.

The full account of what is recorded, why, and what your rights are is in the privacy notice, which is written from the code rather than from a template.

Transport Made Simple Limited, company number 15754458, registered office Roswold House, Oak Drive, Diss, England, IP22 4GX. The app is built and run by us. It is not sold to anybody, licensed to anybody, or used by any other operator.

The business began in 2016 as Vectare, founded by Peter Nathanail and Dominic Kalantary, and now trades as Transport Made Simple. It is an independent bus group running services across the Midlands and East Anglia, and its brands include Central Connect, Simonds and Flagfinders. A colleague may drive for one of those brands and still use this one app, because the duties, the clocking and the hours work the same way whichever name is on the bus.

The rest of what a reader might want is on three other pages.

• The privacy notice, for everything we record and why, including the location captured at clock in and clock out.
• The terms of use, which are the agreement between you and us for the app.
• The support page, for getting something fixed, and for where a passenger should go instead.
• The app download page, if your depot has added you and you are ready to register.