Three checks on every service. Fifteen minutes. Here is what the answers are telling you.
Whenever we visit a school, or run a demonstration, the same question comes up.
Usually near the end, once the excitement about live tracking has settled and someone practical is thinking about Monday morning.
"What do we actually need to do daily? How do we look after our system? What are the tasks we should be doing?"
It is a good question, and it deserves a better answer than "not much, it looks after itself".
Because RollCall is not a set-and-forget system. It is a live record of what happens on your buses every day, and like anything live, it needs someone to look at it.
The routine is smaller than most people fear. Three questions, on every service - AM and PM, every route.
Fifteen to thirty minutes, once a day. The video shows you where each one lives, and the one-page quick reference at the end of this article walks you through them in order.
What follows is the part neither of those can give you: what the answers actually mean, and how to tell the difference between something worth acting on and something that just happened.
You are confirming that your service is doing what you think it is doing.
This is the one to look at first, every day, without exception.
Bus Guardian requires the driver to walk to the rear of the vehicle and tap a checkpoint before completing the run. It is the control that ensures no child is ever left on a bus. On the Operational Dashboard, the colour of the bus icon tells you what happened.
Anything but green, follow it up with the driver or the bus company.
That rule is deliberately blunt, because the alternative is a judgement call made in a hurry, and judgement calls made in a hurry are how a colour that should have been chased becomes a colour that gets scrolled past.
The useful thing is that when you do follow up, the answer is nearly always one of two things - and both are fixable.
Neither of those is a discipline problem. Both are quietly dangerous if nobody notices them, and both disappear the moment someone asks the question.
On the Transport Screen, each stop carries an icon. Solid means the stop was serviced. Outline means it was not.
An unserviced stop is not automatically a problem. There are two ordinary explanations: the run is still in progress, or the stop needs calibrating.
The second is worth understanding, because it is the one that quietly distorts your data. If a stop is not calibrated correctly, the bus can pull up exactly where it should and RollCall will not recognise it as having serviced that stop. Everything looked right on the road. The record disagrees.
Left alone, that stop reports as unserviced day after day, and the people reading the screen learn to ignore it. Which is precisely the habit you do not want, because the day it means something real, it will look identical to every other day.
Calibrate it, and the noise goes away.
The exception flags are the third check, and there are six of them. The quick reference lists each one with exactly what to do, so rather than repeat that here, it is worth understanding what they are collectively telling you.
Three of them are about safety and how the run was driven.
Off stop is also the one flag where it is worth looking at the map rather than the list. Press the action pin and you can compare where the student was scanned on (green) and scanned off (red) against where the stop actually is (blue). A few metres out is a calibration question. A few hundred metres out is a conversation with the driver.
The other three are about whether your bookings still match reality.
That last one is easy to overlook and worth a moment. A casual booking is meant to be occasional. When a casual is on the bus every day, the flag is not really an error - it is RollCall pointing out that the arrangement changed and the booking never caught up.
Whatever the flag, you are only ever asking one thing.
Is this a one-off, or is this a pattern?
A one-off needs noting and nothing more. Life happens - a friend's place after school, a forgotten card, a wet afternoon.
A pattern means reality has changed and RollCall has not been told. A student getting off at the same wrong stop three days a week has not made a mistake. A family turning up unbooked every Tuesday is not being difficult - they may simply need help setting up an ongoing booking. The same off stop three mornings running means something on that route has changed.
This is where a lot of people assume the daily check falls down. If you only ever look at today, how are you supposed to know whether today is unusual?
You are not. Stop Guardian answers that for you.
It lets you look at the same stop across the last 15, 30 or 60 days, so a flag you noticed this morning can be checked against what has been happening for weeks. Something that felt like a one-off turns out to have happened eleven times. Something that felt alarming turns out to be the first occurrence in two months.
That is the difference between a daily check that generates anxiety and one that generates decisions. You are not trying to remember what happened in July. You are asking the system, and it tells you.
So the discipline is not chasing every anomaly. It is noticing what repeats - and then fixing the thing underneath so the record tells the truth again.
There is a new reason to care, and it is worth being blunt about.
As covered in our rollover feature article, the 2027 rollover now builds next year's bookings from each student's actual travel this year. It reads your data and acts on it.
Which means the quality of your daily checks in Term 3 and Term 4 directly determines the quality of your rollover in Term 1.
If students have been travelling unbooked all year, they look like non-travellers to the rollover and may not carry forward. If students hold bookings they never use, they roll over into seats they will not sit in. If a stop has been quietly miscalibrated since March, the travel it recorded is not the travel that happened.
Fifteen minutes a morning between now and November is the single best preparation you can do for next year's rollover.
Good data in November is a calm February.
Five minutes, and it shows you exactly where each of the three checks lives on screen.
It has the bus icon colours, the stop icons and all six flags with what to do about each. Stick it beside the monitor.
Download the Daily Exception Check (PDF)
Somewhere between 9:30 and 10:00am works well - your AM run has finished and synced, and you are past the morning rush. Do that morning's AM services and the previous afternoon's PM services together, so nothing sits unexamined for more than about eighteen hours.
Do that, and your system stays in premium condition - clean data, and a record that is a true reflection of how well your service is actually operating.
If you would like a walkthrough of the daily check on your own service - what is normal for a school your size, and what is worth acting on - our support team is happy to sit down with you. Email support@rollcall.com.au.
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