Plan your school bus routes once. Edit anytime, in seconds.

How most Indian schools draw their bus routes today

It is the second week of April. The transport in-charge is sitting on the side bench of the office with a printed sheet that says "Route Plan 2024-25" — last year's. He is editing it in pen. A new colony has come up off the bypass, three children from Sector 18 have changed houses, two stops have been merged because one driver complained, and Bus 6 has a new driver whose name nobody has written down yet. The same sheet will be photocopied for every driver on the first day of school and stuck above each bus dashboard with a strip of cellotape.

For the next ten months, every change to that route — a child shifting from Sec 12 to Sec 19, a stop dropped because the road is dug up, a bus going for service — will travel from office to driver by phone call. Sometimes WhatsApp. Sometimes nothing. Parents will discover route changes when their child reaches the wrong stop. The accountant will discover, three months later, that two students were paying for a stop they no longer use. By October, the printed sheet is unreadable and the driver is running the route from memory.

If even one of those scenes feels familiar, you do not need a smarter version of that sheet. You need a real planner. Inside Inkwelly's Transport module, the route is a real thing — not a paragraph in a Word document. The stops are real. The timings are real. And the moment you save a change, it travels to the driver's phone, the parent's app, the fee ledger and the attendance register, all by itself.

How the route planner actually feels to use

The in-charge opens Transport → Routes and sees every route the school runs today. Code, name, the bus, the driver, the number of children, the morning and afternoon timings. He clicks New Route and the planner opens.

Step 1. Name the route and pick what kind it is. Type a route code (something short the driver can shout on the radio — say, R-04) and a name parents will recognise: Sector 18 to Bazar Atariya. Then pick the kind of route — a regular pickup-and-drop, a fast express route for far-flung students, an AC premium route, a teachers-only staff bus, an airport run for hostel weekends, or a one-off special run for a school trip. Each kind can carry its own fee plan — choose right once, the accountant smiles for the rest of the year.

Step 2. Decide which legs of the day this route runs. Morning pickup, afternoon drop, or both. Schools that run the same bus for both legs do not have to maintain two parallel routes — Inkwelly handles morning and drop on a single route with two timing tables.

Step 3. Add your stops in order. For each stop, type the name as parents know it (Bazar Atariya, opposite SBI ATM), the planned pickup time for the morning shift and the drop time for the afternoon. Drag a row up or down to reorder. Tag the stop with its zone so distance-based fees figure themselves out.

Step 4. Pin the bus and the driver. Pick the bus from your fleet list. Pick the driver and the conductor or attendant on duty from your people list. While you are saving, Inkwelly quietly checks the driver's licence dates, the bus fitness certificate, the insurance and the permit — if anything is close to expiring, you see it in red before you save, not on the day the RTO van arrives.

Step 5. Save and let the school catch up. The instant you save, the driver's phone shows the new route on its next sync. The parent app updates the child's pickup card. The fee ledger picks up the route's pricing. Tomorrow's attendance register already knows the stops. One save, the whole school in sync.

What it looks like — five screens, end to end

“Pehle har month route sheet print karte the. Stop change hone par ek-ek driver ko phone karke bolna padta tha. Ab Inkwelly mein drag karke stop hila do, parent ko WhatsApp pe confirmation jaata hai aur driver app khud refresh ho jaata hai. Mera Saturday wapas mil gaya.”

Five real moments this planner is built for

1. The mid-October stop change. A child's family shifts from Sector 12 to Sector 18. The in-charge opens the route, drags the new stop into place, the system warns him a sister at the old stop will lose her boarding point unless reassigned. He reassigns her on the same screen. The fee adjusts pro-rata. A WhatsApp confirmation lands on the parent's phone. The driver's app catches up by the next morning. Three minutes, start to finish.

2. Bus 4 has gone for service. The in-charge swaps Bus 12 onto Route 4. The pre-save check spots that Bus 12's GPS device was never fitted (the school had not enabled it on the spare). He attaches the device code, saves, and the route runs that morning with full tracking. Parents notice nothing — the stop, the timing and the driver are exactly where they should be.

3. Three families from a colony three kilometres off the route. They have just enrolled from Greenwood Estate. The in-charge runs Compare Routes to see whether to add a stop to Route 4 or run a new route. The screen shows the extra distance, the impact on existing pickup times and the cost per trip. He adds the stop, the timings for stops further down shift by four minutes, and the parents of those stops get an automatic update on the change.

4. The hostel airport run. A residential school running a campus 12 km from town adds an express route for the few boarders who go home each weekend. The fee plan attaches itself; the route is restricted to vehicles that hold the right long-distance permit; the in-charge picks the only such bus in the fleet and the system validates everything before it lets him save.

5. The Durga Puja week. Schools in West Bengal run reduced services in the October holiday week. The in-charge marks the route quiet for those seven days from the transport holiday calendar. Fees do not apply. Drivers are off rota. Parents see the holiday tag on their app and are not surprised when no bus arrives. On the first working day after the break, the route wakes up by itself.

See your school's bus routes built live in 20 minutes

Bring whatever you have today — printed sheet, Excel, paper register. On the demo we will rebuild two of your real routes inside Inkwelly while you watch, and show what daily edits look like once the school is live.

Limits, safety and the small print

How big a route can get. The standard plan supports up to 40 stops on a route, which covers everything most Indian schools need. Hostel and inter-city schools that run longer airport-pickup routes can ask for the extended plan that goes up to 100 stops. The drag-and-drop builder stays smooth all the way to 60 stops; beyond that, stops paginate quietly so the screen never feels heavy.

How many routes you can run. As many as you want. Schools running 60 plus buses use the same plan as schools running two. Sorting, filtering by route kind and direction, and search-by-stop-name keep the list usable as the fleet grows.

Mid-year edits do not rewrite history. Every version of a route is preserved. If a stop is renamed in October, the August fee receipt still shows the original name. Auditors can reconstruct the route exactly as it stood on any past date.

No two routes can claim the same bus or driver at the same time. Inkwelly enforces non-overlapping schedules. The driver app refuses a second trip while one is already running. The classic 7:30 a.m. emergency of two routes, one bus, no driver simply does not happen.

Who can edit what. The transport in-charge can edit any route. Class teachers can view but not edit. Drivers see only the routes assigned to them. The principal sees everything plus a quarterly route-utilisation report. Overriding a compliance warning needs a higher role and a written reason, recorded against the route.

Moving in from another system. Cloning routes from last session takes one click; only the changes need editing. Schools migrating from another ERP fill in a CSV onboarding template, and we import every route, stop, bus, driver and student assignment in a single pass. We have done these migrations from Fedena, Entab, MyClassboard and several State Board ERPs.