How Alpha Logistiek cut CAO admin from days to minutes

Anyone who plans drivers under the road-transport collective labour agreement, the CAO, knows how the month tends to end. The hours are logged, but turning them into correct pay is the hard part, and it has to be right. The CAO gives drivers real entitlements: a meal allowance after a long shift, extra for night and weekend hours, overtime that turns on each driver's contract hours rather than one fixed line. Get it wrong and it cuts both ways: a driver underpaid, or the business paying for overtime it never needed. Some of it stacks and some of it explicitly does not, and a single driver's day can run to a dozen rules or more. So the hours sit in one system, the sums get done by hand in a spreadsheet, and the one person who truly understands the agreement becomes the person you cannot run payroll without.

Jordi de Koning runs Alpha Logistiek in Amersfoort with his co-owner Dave Roemeling, moving medicines, vaccines, and
temperature-sensitive freight for healthcare clients across the country. Alpha runs its operation on Shiftbase, where Jordi plans his drivers, tracks their hours, and keeps the team's records in one place. By connecting CAO / API on top of that foundation, Jordi got the CAO applied to those hours automatically and correctly. The result: work that used to take a couple of days a week now takes a few minutes a month, drivers paid exactly what the CAO entitles them to, a running view of what the hours cost so overtime stops slipping through, and a pay calculation anyone can explain, line by line.

Image: (Frank @ CAO / API) & Jordi (Alpha co-founder) 

The challenge: the CAO lived in a spreadsheet and one person's head

Jordi de Koning and Dave Roemeling started Alpha Logistiek in 2020 and built it into a specialist in medical and pharmaceutical logistics: conditioned vehicles, trained drivers, vaccines, and diagnostics moving on tight windows. Today more than 50 people work across the operation, most of them drivers, and all of them fall under the CAO Beroepsgoederenvervoer, the collective labour agreement for road transport.                              

The hours themselves were never the hard part. Alpha already had them clean and in one place in Shiftbase. Turning them into correct pay was the challenge. Every period, the team copied the hours into Excel and applied the transport CAO by hand, and that agreement is one of the harder ones to get right. One person spent about two days a week on it. Worse, all of that knowledge lived with a single colleague, so the stretch it had to run without them was the stretch the risk became obvious.

Looking back, Jordi puts it plainly:

"All those hours went into an Excel sheet, and one person spent about two days a week on it. When that knowledge wasn't available to us, we were stuck. That is not a position you want to be in."

Jordi de Koning, Co-owner, Alpha Logistiek

The solution: Shiftbase at the core, with CAO / API plugged in

The platform was already in place. Alpha runs its operation on Shiftbase, where it plans its drivers, tracks their hours, keeps its employee records, and pulls the reports it needs. Because the schedules, hours, and absences all live there, accurate and in one system, Alpha had a single, reliable source of truth to build on, and that foundation is what made the next step easy.

Jordi wanted the CAO rules to run themselves, without a bigger spreadsheet or another colleague holding them in their head. So Alpha became the launch customer for CAO / API and plugged it into Shiftbase. It pulls the hours, schedules, and absences from Shiftbase automatically over an API. Alpha subscribed to the transport CAO template, and CAO / API applies those rules to the worked hours in real time, turning the agreement into usable logic Jordi can tune to the way Alpha actually runs. It also surfaces what needs a human eye, flagging where overtime is building up so Jordi can catch avoidable labour cost before it lands on the payroll. Set-up took minutes, guided the whole way, with no big implementation project, nothing new for the drivers to learn, and nothing to copy over.

What sold him was simple: because everything already lived in Shiftbase, the connection was quick to switch on, the calculation came back in seconds, and every line could be traced to the rule behind it.

"I was sold straight away. Now I am not dependent on one person. The software does the work, and I can see exactly what it did."

Jordi de Koning, Co-owner, Alpha Logistiek

For CAO / API, Alpha is the kind of customer the tool was built for, and the timing matters.

"Collective labour agreements keep getting more complex, and from 2027 employers have to show people exactly how their pay is built up. Because Alpha's hours already lived in Shiftbase, switching us on took minutes, and every allowance we apply can be explained back to the rule."

Frank Müller, Operational Director / Program Manager, CAO / API

Results at a glance

The change shows up right across the month-end at Alpha:

The impact: the CAO runs in software, not in one person's head

These days, month-end closing runs smoothly. The hours come out of Shiftbase, CAO / API applies the CAO in real time as they land, and the finished wage components are ready for the accountant, automated and explainable, every line traceable to a rule. Jordi can still look at any driver in Shiftbase and see who has hours left to give, so his planners know who to put on a route. And because the cost of those hours is visible as they happen, not weeks later once payroll has paid out, he stays ahead of the exceptions: he can watch overtime building and act on it, and keep a grip on labour cost while he can still change it. What used to take days is now a quick check, and when someone asks why an allowance came out the way it did, the answer sits right there against the rule.

"What used to take days now takes only a few minutes. And throughout the week, I can see per driver who still has hours left, which allows us to plan better as well."

Jordi de Koning, Co-owner, Alpha Logistiek

The bigger change is what Jordi no longer carries.

"The best part is that it no longer hangs on one person. The software is the colleague who is always there. I was really enthusiastic about it, and I still am."

Jordi de Koning, Co-owner, Alpha Logistiek

What's next, for Alpha Logistiek and for Shiftbase

With the calculations off his plate, Jordi is focused on growing Alpha and keeping its healthcare clients served on time. The timing helps him: from 2027, Dutch employers have to give hired and flexible workers a clear view of the rules behind their pay, and Alpha can already produce exactly that.

Shiftbase is built to grow with operators like Jordi, and not every specialist job belongs inside one platform. The App Center is where partners like CAO / API plug in, so a transport company can keep planning and tracking hours in Shiftbase and hand the most demanding part of the CAO to a tool built for it. Solve the hard part today, grow into the next stage tomorrow.