The 26-day month: how car-with-driver contracts really bill

Ask any car-with-driver operator in Dhaka how a monthly contract bills and you’ll get the same first answer: a fixed body rent for about 26 working days. Then the real answer starts.

Extra days are charged daily. Overtime is charged by the hour. Lunch and dinner allowances, tolls and parking at actual, fuel — and a night allowance when the car goes outstation. All of it billed on top of the monthly rent.

The logbook is the source of truth

Every evening the client signs a paper log for the car: when it started, when it finished, how far it went, what was paid on the road. At the end of the month someone collects those logs and turns them into an invoice. Payment is commonly due around the 10th.

Six lines, and every one of them comes from the log. If a single evening’s overtime is missed, the invoice is wrong — and so is the driver’s pay, because the overtime the client pays for is the overtime the driver is paid for.

Where it goes wrong

Logs get lost, photographed badly, or filled in from memory on the 30th. Overtime is worked out with a calculator. The invoice and the payslip are built in two different sheets by two different people, and they disagree.

“The overtime the client pays for should be the overtime the driver is paid for.”

Log it once

The fix is boring and it works: the driver records the duty on the day, on their phone. The invoice line and the payslip line are both built from that one row, priced from your own price card. Month end becomes a check, not a project.

That’s the idea Renta is built on. Whether you use it or not, try one month of same-day logging — your 10th of the month will thank you.