Chivas Rumba: the notebook, the dispatch mornings and the money slipping away unseen

A normal day started before the first customer arrived

When I first saw how Chivas Rumba operated, what caught my attention wasn't the music or the colorful buses: it was the notebook. Everything was there. That night's bookings, the deposits, who had paid in full, who would pay when boarding and which agency had sent which group.

Every morning someone sat down to build the day's dispatch. They copied bookings from the notebook into a list, went through WhatsApp chats to see if anyone had changed the time or headcount, looked through screenshots for the transfers that had come in, and called the drivers to settle which bus left with whom. That first part of the day sold nothing: it only organized what had already been sold.

The business worked, and it worked well. But it depended on one person keeping everything in their head and on nobody making a mistake when adding up.

The problem wasn't the work, it was where the information lived

Nobody at Chivas Rumba was doing anything wrong. The problem was that a single booking lived in four different places: the chat where the customer asked, the notebook where it was written down, the screenshot of the transfer and the memory of whoever took it. Answering a simple question —"how many seats are left for Saturday?"— meant putting a puzzle together.

• Bookings arriving through WhatsApp, Instagram, phone calls and partner agencies.
• Deposits and balances written by hand, sometimes on different pages.
• Transfers confirmed by looking at screenshots, with no single record.
• A dispatch rebuilt from scratch every single morning.

The money slipping away unseen

The most delicate part wasn't time, it was money. When accounts are done by hand, mistakes make no noise: a deposit that was written down but never subtracted from the balance, a group that boarded and never finished paying, an agency commission counted twice, or a duplicate booking that took a seat that could have been sold.

None of those mistakes alone breaks a business. But they repeat every night, and at month end the cash doesn't match what was sold and there's no way to know where the gap came from. It wasn't carelessness: it was arithmetic by hand, every day, with the phone ringing.

What we built together

We didn't start with technology, we started with the notebook. We went through how a booking was taken, how it was charged and how it was dispatched, and designed the system to do exactly that, without depending on anyone's memory.

It all runs on Zarpe, the tour booking system born from this project that I now offer to other agencies:

• A booking site (reserva.chivasrumba.com.co) where customers pick their departure, enter each passenger and pay online with Wompi, in full or with a deposit.
• A QR voucher delivered by WhatsApp and validated when boarding.
• A management dashboard with the offer, the departure calendar, customers and the bookings the team takes by phone or in person.
• The payment status of every booking —paid, deposit or pending— in plain sight, no screenshots needed.
• Daily sales and collection reports, and a channel for partner agencies to sell with their own records.

What mornings look like now

Dispatch is no longer built: it's looked up. The day's bookings are on the dashboard with their passengers, departure and payment status. What was collected yesterday shows up in the report, not in a hand-made sum. And when a customer asks if there's room, the answer is right there, not in someone else's notebook.

The system has been in production since September 2026. We keep improving it every month with what the team asks for, which is exactly the point: the tool adapts to the business, not the other way around.

What I take away from this project

• A small business's most expensive losses are usually invisible: they don't show up anywhere because nobody is measuring them.
• The first step isn't buying software, it's deciding where each piece of data will live.
• A good system doesn't take work away from the team: it takes away the repetitive work so they can serve customers better.