German operators searching for Vermittlungssoftware — brokering software — mean one of two very different things, and supplier websites do little to separate them. This piece exists primarily in German, written for the operators it concerns; this English version summarises the argument for everyone else.
Disposition is scheduling your own vehicles and your own drivers: the job stays in your house from enquiry to invoice. Vermittlung is passing the job to someone who does not work for you — a taxi dispatch centre allocating work to affiliated independent owner-drivers, or a private hire firm handing an overflow job to a subcontracting partner. The job changes company; your responsibility for it does not automatically follow.
Most growing operations end up doing both. So the useful software question is not “brokering or dispatch?” but whether a system models both actions honestly — or pretends a hand-off to another business is the same thing as assigning your own driver.
The two brokering models
The classic model is the Taxizentrale: a dispatch centre whose product is the brokering, radioing jobs to legally independent taxi operators. Software for that model is control-room software — job exchange, allocation logic, settlement between centre and affiliates. If that is your business, you belong with the established German control-room systems, a category I mapped in the TARIS / SuE / HALE / DMRZ piece.
The quieter model affects far more firms: the chauffeur or Mietwagen operator who forwards jobs to partners when the fleet is full. That is brokering at small scale — and in most businesses it runs through WhatsApp with no system, no margin record and no clean paper trail. The commercial case for fixing that is in subcontracting without losing the margin; the German original of this article covers the software side.
The record stays yours
The point WhatsApp brokering misses: the booking arrived with you. German law (§ 49(4) PBefG) requires private hire bookings to be received at the operator’s business premises and recorded in an order-intake register — a duty that attaches when the order reaches you, and is not undone because a partner ends up driving it. The details of that register, and what the legislator expressly allows to be kept electronically, are in the digital Auftragseingangsbuch guide. The contractual side — how liability sits between you and a subcontractor — belongs in a written agreement and, in doubt, with your lawyer; no software replaces that.
The minimum bar for any system that takes brokering seriously follows directly: a forwarded job must not vanish from your records. It stays logged as your order intake, timestamped, with the customer, the agreed hand-off price and who actually drove it. Four demo questions worth asking any supplier: does the forwarded job stay in my revenue reporting; are the hand-off price and my selling price recorded as two numbers; what exactly does the partner see (the job, not my customer base); and who vets the partner’s licence, insurance, vehicles and drivers — the system, or my desk?
How we built it — disclosed
We build RideDesk, so read this as an interested party’s description. RideDesk is dispatch software for pre-booked passenger work first, with forwarding built in as a first-class action: partners apply through a form, upload their company documents, vehicles and drivers themselves, and every item is approved individually — including an EU VIES check on the VAT ID — before a job can be handed to them in one click, at an agreed cost, with the margin recorded per job and the booking retained in your own records. Two honest caveats: the partner network sits on the Enterprise plan ($199/month as of August 2026, current pricing), which an operator forwarding two jobs a year does not need — and it does not replace a radio-circuit Taxizentrale; if you run one of those, control-room software is the right purchase and we are not.
The question to answer before comparing any of this: count last quarter’s forwarded jobs — and the jobs you declined because forwarding was too much friction. Below five a quarter, a standing agreement with one trusted partner and a clean per-job record is enough. At one a week, brokering has become a revenue line, and the declined jobs are the number that should bother you: each one was demand that failed on process, not on the market.
General information as of August 2026, not legal advice. PBefG duties and licence conditions vary by case — settle the contractual and liability questions of subcontracting with your lawyer.
