Download Your Transport Data — One Excel File, Any Time
Your parties, trips, bilties, invoices, payments and ledger — one click, one Excel file, whenever you want. Here is why every transporter should be able to walk out with their own data.
Ask a transporter what happens if the software company shuts down tomorrow, and you will usually get silence — then a nervous laugh.
It is a fair worry. Years of party balances, bilty numbers, lorry hire, advances and payments sit inside somebody else's computer. Most software will not give it back without a phone call, an email, and a week of waiting. Some will not give it back at all.
We think that is backwards. Your data is yours. So in TransportMaster there is a button for it.
One click, one file
Open Settings → My Backup and press Download backup. A few seconds later you have one Excel file:
`TransportMaster-Backup-<your company>-<date>.xlsx`
Inside it, every list of your account has its own sheet:
Dates are plain (`2026-09-23`), and amounts are real numbers — select a column in Excel and it totals, no cleaning up required.
Why this matters more than it sounds
1. A hard disk failing is not your problem any more. The old register was one flood away from gone. A copy in your email or Google Drive is not.
2. GST and audit. When the accountant asks for the year's freight bills or the party ledger, you send one file instead of taking fifty screenshots.
3. Staff leaving. The munim who kept "his" book is not a risk when the whole account exports in ten seconds.
4. Your bank and your buyer. Anyone who wants to see your business — a loan officer, a partner, a buyer — can be shown real records, not a promise.
5. You are not locked in. If you ever leave us, you leave with your data. Software should keep you because it works, not because it holds your ledger hostage.
The part people do not ask about: who took the backup
A backup file has your customers, their balances and your rates. So every download is recorded.
- Only the account owner can take it. Staff do not even see the button, and the API refuses them.
- The page shows the last ten downloads — date, who took it, how many records, file size.
- We keep a daily limit, so nobody can hammer the server with an automatic script.
If you have staff, this alone is worth the feature: you will always know when a copy of your books left the building.
What we do on our side
Your own backup is one half. The other half is ours:
- the server takes its own database backups, and we take one before every update
- updates are applied with a checksum check and a one-command rollback
- your file is built fresh each time — nothing is stored on our server waiting to leak
How to keep your backup safe
1. Take a backup once a month, and after any big month-end
2. Save it in two places — the office computer and Google Drive or your email
3. Rename it with the month: `Backup-Sep-2026.xlsx`
4. Do not forward it on WhatsApp groups. It holds your rates and your parties' balances.
Questions transporters ask
Do I need Excel?
No. It opens in Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice — all of which are free to view.
Will it slow down the software?
No. A full account of a busy broker builds in under a second and is about 90 KB.
Can my staff take a backup?
No. Only the account owner. That is on purpose.
Can I get the data back in if something goes wrong?
Tell us and we restore from our own backups. The Excel file is your copy for safety, audit and peace of mind.
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Software should be easy to leave. That is exactly why people stay.