Proof of delivery and driver apps for your fleet

Start by checking off-the-shelf delivery software

There is a mature market of delivery management software, and for many fleets it is the right answer. Three names you will come across, and what their own pages and independent reviews say about them:

• Track-POD: an electronic proof of delivery app for Android and iOS that captures signatures, photos, geotags and timestamps, works offline and syncs later, plus route planning, live tracking and an API that can pass signed delivery notes to your ERP or accounting system.
• Onfleet: priced by completed tasks (deliveries or pickups) per month, with photo and signature capture, barcode scanning, route optimisation, customer SMS with estimated arrival times and a well-regarded API, according to TechRadar's June 2026 review.
• Spoke Dispatch, formerly Circuit for Teams: monthly plans priced by the number of stops, with unlimited drivers, signature and photo capture, SMS and email notifications, an API and webhooks on every plan.

When a bespoke delivery driver app makes sense

If your drops are simple and your ERP already has a connector to one of these products, a subscription is cheaper and quicker than any build, and a few months of use will show you what you really need. A bespoke delivery driver app for your own fleet starts to pay off when the delivery is only half the job:

• Line-level delivery notes: partial deliveries, refused or damaged lines with a reason, and substitutions that must turn into a credit note or a corrected invoice.
• Collections on the same route: empty pallets, cages, kegs, returns or a signed returns note.
• Payment on delivery for trade customers on cash terms.
• Batch, use-by date or temperature recorded at the door for food or pharmacy deliveries.
• An ERP without a connector, or business rules no package lets you configure. This is where most of the work sits, and it is the same discipline as our ERP integration services.
• Per-task or per-stop pricing that becomes expensive with many small drops a day.

What a proof of delivery record should capture

Whether you buy or build, check that each delivery leaves behind a record you could show a customer in a dispute. Drivers work in basements, loading bays and rural lanes, so the record must save without signal and sync later; that is the core of offline-first app development.

Tracking drivers without breaking UK GDPR

A driver app records where your staff are, so it is worker monitoring. The ICO's guidance on monitoring workers, published in October 2023, says you must tell workers and passengers about any vehicle monitoring, that you will rarely be able to justify monitoring during private use, and that a data protection impact assessment is expected before high-risk monitoring. It also treats tools that analyse driving behaviour as harder to justify.

In design terms, that usually means tracking only while a route is active, showing customers an arrival window rather than the driver's live position all day, and setting how long location history is kept. This is not legal advice; check the details of your case with your data protection adviser.

How we would build it and what drives the cost

A food distributor, for example, could start with one depot: the day's routes pulled from the ERP, signature and photo at the door, and the signed note attached to the order. Customer alerts and automatic route optimisation could follow once drivers trust the app.

At every demo, every two weeks, you test the driver app on a phone in your own yard, and the project has one fixed price agreed before we start; more on how we work. The main cost drivers are:

• Integration with your ERP or order system, and whether it has a usable API.
• Route planning: manual ordering by the planner, or optimisation with time windows and vehicle capacity.
• Delivery types: plain drops, collections, payments, temperature checks.
• Customer notifications by SMS or email, which carry a cost per message.
• Devices: drivers' own phones, company phones or rugged handhelds with scanners.