California CPUC TCP Compliance: What Records Your Limo Dispatch Software Must Keep (2026)

Who needs a TCP permit?

California regulates for-hire passenger transportation arranged in advance on a prearranged basis — limousines, sedans, SUVs, vans and buses — as charter-party carriage under CPUC authority, with a TCP (Transportation Charter Party) permit issued to the carrier. The class of permit depends on your vehicles and operating pattern.

Because permit classes, fees, filings and inspection requirements change, treat the CPUC's own published requirements as the source of truth and verify your class before you accept your first booking. This article is a records checklist, not legal advice.

What records should you be able to produce?

Whatever the current filing detail, enforcement conversations come back to the same question: can you show, for a specific date and vehicle, who drove, who rode, what was charged and that both driver and vehicle were qualified at the time? Build your record-keeping around that question.

Why prearranged-only matters operationally

Charter-party authority is built around prearranged transportation. That has a practical consequence: your system should be able to demonstrate that each trip was arranged in advance, with a timestamped booking record that precedes the pick-up.

Practically, that means taking bookings through your own channels — website, phone, account portal, messaging — into one record with a booking timestamp, rather than accepting curbside work with no paper trail.

What should your dispatch software do for you?

Compliance software is not a separate product; it is your operating records, kept properly and exportable.

• Immutable trip records with booking timestamp, passenger, driver, vehicle and itemised charge.
• Driver credential and licence expiry tracking with advance warnings, so an unqualified driver cannot be dispatched.
• Vehicle inspection and maintenance history per vehicle with document attachments.
• Insurance certificate storage with expiry alerts.
• Date-range exports in CSV or PDF you can hand over without rebuilding from memory.
• Retention aligned to the longest period any authority requires of you, plus your own data-ownership export.

How does Limozoft handle this?

Trip records, driver credential expiry warnings, vehicle maintenance history, insurance document storage and date-range audit exports are included at one-time setup from $399, then $10–$40/month by fleet size, with no per-trip, per-booking or per-driver fees. Your records remain exportable at any time — see our data-ownership page for what leaves with you.

We do not certify your compliance and cannot: your permit class, filings and retention periods are between you and the CPUC. What we can do is make sure the underlying records exist, are complete, and can be produced quickly.