Getting help with the TMS Drive app

Then this is the wrong page and the app is not for you. TMS Drive is an internal system for colleagues who work for the Transport Made Simple group. It has nothing to do with bus times, tickets, refunds, lost property or complaints about a journey.

For anything about a bus service, please use the Transport Made Simple website or the website of the operator whose bus you travelled on, such as Central Connect, Simonds or Flagfinders. Nobody who reads this page can help with a journey.

For almost everything, your depot is faster than anybody else and can actually change the thing that is wrong. Speak to the SDC or the planning office at your depot if:

• a shift shows on your phone that is not yours, or one of yours is missing
• the times on a duty look wrong
• you could not clock in, or you clocked in late because the app refused you
• you forgot to clock out
• your hours for the week look wrong
• the vehicle shown against your duty is not the one you took

Every one of those is fixed by a person at the depot in minutes. None of them is fixed faster by emailing anybody else.

Leave and absence go to your line manager, who approves or refuses a request in the system. If a request has sat unanswered, chase your manager rather than the app.

Three things go wrong here, and they have different answers.

Your email address is not recognised. Your depot has not added you to the app yet, or has added a different address. Ask the depot to check the address they hold for you. Only a work email address that HR holds will work.

You have forgotten your password. Use the reset option in the app. It emails you a link that lasts twenty four hours and can be used once. If you ask for several, only the most recent one works, which is why an older email in your inbox may say the link has expired.

It says your account is no longer active. Either the account has been suspended or your record has been marked as having left. Speak to your depot or to HR.

A note on why this is fiddly: your app account is created from your HR record in TMS Insights, which is the source of truth. Nothing can be fixed in the app that is wrong in HR, so the fix nearly always starts there.

It will tell you why. The reasons and what each one means:

• You are too far from the depot. The check is done on our server against your depot, not on your phone. Move into the yard and try again.
• You have no duty today. The roster does not have you down. Call the depot: that is a planning problem, not a phone problem.
• It is too early. You can clock in from fifteen minutes before sign on, and the message tells you the exact time to come back.
• We could not get a reliable location. The fix from your phone was too old. Step outside or away from the building and try again.
• You are already clocked in. A previous attempt worked even if it did not look like it.

Every attempt is recorded, including the refused ones. So if you tried at 05:38 and it would not let you, the depot can see that and correct your hours by hand. Do tell them, but you are not relying on being believed.

If the app crashes, will not load, or is plainly broken rather than showing wrong information, tell your depot first so they know, and include:

• what you were doing when it happened
• the date and roughly the time
• your depot
• the make and model of your phone
• the app version, which is at the bottom of the app settings screen

Those five things are the difference between a fault somebody can trace and a report nobody can act on.

If you have been to your depot and to your manager and the problem is still there, or the problem is with the app itself rather than with your roster, write to us:

tom.singleton@transportmadesimple.co.uk

Please put your depot and your name in the message. Nobody reading that mailbox can see which depot an email came from.

This mailbox is monitored during office hours on working days. It is not an out of hours line. If you cannot start your duty right now, ring your depot: that is what the depot number is for, and no email will be read in time.

Anything about what the app records, including the location captured when you clock in and out, is answered in the privacy notice. If you want to see what we hold about you, or you want to object to something, write to tom.singleton@transportmadesimple.co.uk. That is a different mailbox from support, and it goes to the people who can actually answer it.

The rules for using the app are in the terms of use, the app download page explains how to get the app and register, and the about page explains what the app is and who it is for.

Transport Made Simple Limited, company number 15754458, registered in England and Wales. Registered office: Roswold House, Oak Drive, Diss, England, IP22 4GX.