Top 10 Reasons for Using School Bus Routing Software

Are you transporting students on buses? What about vans? If you are, then you should be using school bus routing software.  It does not matter if you have 1 bus or 1,000 buses, you should be using bus routing software to manage your bus fleet.

Using any school bus routing software can be time consuming to set it up, but once you do, you will certainly benefit from your efforts.

1. It will reduce the time it takes to manage your fleet. Routing and scheduling software is a tool designed to save you time.  Some BusBoss users report that they used to work long hours in the summer to prepare for the new year.  Once they started using BusBoss, there was no longer a need to work as much.
2. You will know that all your students are accounted for prior to the start of school. Do you get bombarded with parent phone calls on the first day of school? “You never stopped to pick up my child!” A good school bus routing and scheduling software application will help verify that all students are accounted for.  Within BusBoss, we call it BusBuster.  BusBuster analyzes your data and reports on any problems it finds. If you can run BusBuster without any problems, then you know each child in BusBoss is properly accommodated.
3. You’ll be able to see inefficiencies and correct them. A good school bus routing software application will allow you to view multiple routes on the map simultaneously.  If you see routes with excessive overlaps, chances are very good that there are inefficiencies.  You should also check your maximum bus load to determine if the buses are filled to (near) capacity.
4. You may be able to eliminate bus routes saving your district money. If your school bus routing software package does not offer a global/fleet optimization option, you should immediately start looking for a replacement.  BusBoss allows you to run various fleet optimization scenarios.  This will tell you the number of buses required to get students to school on time.
5. You will be able to reduce times and miles by optimizing existing bus routes. By viewing the route paths, you can easily see where routes overlap each other.  In this situation, you may be able to move stops from one route to another to reduce the travel distances (and times).  Optimizing the stop order of your existing routes will also save time and miles.
6. Your information will be accessible to others in the school district, reducing the number of interruptions you get throughout the day. How often do you get a call asking what bus a student is assigned to? When you purchase BusBoss, you get a district wide license for unlimited users allowing you to install the software on as many district owned computers as you want without having to pay additional licence fees.  This allows users to look up information themselves.
7. Preparing for next year's routes will be simple and take a fraction of the time it did before.  Many of our customers are ready for the next school year to begin even before the last bell for the year has rung.  There will always be last minute roster changes as a result of parents not informing you in a timely fashion, but the bulk of the work will be done for you automatically by BusBoss.
8. You will be able to maximize your state reimbursement while making sure you report accurate counts. Each state has reporting requirements.  Some allow for variations in reporting.  For example, in Pennsylvania you need to pick 1 day in each month, but it does not matter which day, so it is in your best interest to pick the day that results in the most reimbursement money.  With BusBoss, you can easily generate the reports for each day and then decide which to use.
9. You will be prepared when you get audited by the state for your transportation reimbursement. You know those audits you get from the state occasionally?  Do you lose sleep at night worrying that you’ve collected all the information you will need prior to an audit?  With school bus routing and scheduling applications, you will be able to print the reports needed by the auditors any time you want.
10. All the cool people are doing it! Why do people like top 10 lists, but not top 9?
    Seriously though, school bus routing and scheduling applications are meant to make life easier. What could be cooler than that?

Once you are effectively using bus routing software, you will notice that tasks that would have been impossible before, are a simple mouse click away and you’ll wonder how you ever survived without it!