Adding cars, rates and compliance

Add a car from its registration, check it against the DVSA MOT record, set a rate card, and keep insurance, service and ULEZ details only you can know.

Fleet is where your cars live, and its Vehicles view, headed "Fleet", is the register itself. It is worth doing properly early: a saved car autocompletes on every booking, brings its own price and deposit with it, shows up on the availability calendar, and is what the Fleet attention section on your Today screen is actually watching.

Adding one car

1. Go to Fleet, then the Vehicles view, and tap Add vehicle. On a fleet with no cars yet the form is already open.
2. Put the registration in and tap Look up (Check, on a phone). KeyProof reads the DVSA MOT record for that plate: make, model, colour, the year it was first used, every MOT test it has had, and the mileage the government recorded at each one. It fills the vehicle name in for you and tells you, in a sentence, which service the answer came from. If you had already typed a name, the one it found is offered beside it with a Use this name button.
3. Check the vehicle name. This is the label you will pick on a booking, so make it the one you say out loud: "BMW M4 · LX26 ABC".
4. Add vehicle (Save vehicle, on a phone). There is nothing else to decide: every car runs the same checks on every hire.

If the DVSA holds no MOT record for that registration, KeyProof says so rather than guessing, and you type the car in by hand. A car under three years old has never been tested, so an empty MOT history on a new car is normal and is not reported as a fault. Where registration lookups are not switched on at all, the plate is still saved and shown, and the car is typed in by hand.

Adding a whole fleet at once

Add several cars takes a paste or a .csv file: registrations, one per line, is enough. It then shows you exactly what will be created, row by row, with a verdict on each one, and only then offers the button that writes anything. Duplicates of cars you already have are flagged before they are added, and one import handles up to 100 cars.

Each accepted registration is looked up against the DVSA record on the way in, so most cars arrive already named with their make and model and carrying their MOT history, from the plate alone. Anything you pasted yourself still wins over the lookup.

After they are in, a single grid lets you fill in the rest: the daily rate, and make, model and year for any car the lookup could not name, tabbing across and down, with a bulk daily rate so a firm that prices in two bands types each number once instead of twenty times. Finish later closes the grid and you can come back to it.

What the list shows

The Vehicles view is a catalogue of cards, one per car. Each carries a studio picture of the model, a coloured band naming the car's state, the name and year, the plate, who has it and when it is back (or "Overdue, was due back" in red when it is late), the mileage from the DVSA record, and the one thing most worth knowing about it: the reason it is off the road, its worst expired or due-soon date, or its MOT date. A meter at the foot says how many days it has been out this month. Tap the card and that car's record opens underneath it.

The band uses the same words as Today and Bookings: Available, On hire, Overdue, Due soon, Dates missing, Off the road, or the date that has lapsed, such as "MOT expired". A car with an MOT, insurance or tax date nobody has entered reads Dates missing rather than Available, because nothing says it is legal to hire. Filter chips above the list (All, Available, On hire, Due soon, Dates missing and Attention) each carry a count, and a search box appears once you are running more than eight cars.

What opens when you tap a car

The opened car is one list of facts, each stated once with a word as well as a colour: MOT, Insurance, Tax, Service and ULEZ, then, where the DVSA record has them, the mileage at the last MOT, the last MOT's advisories or defects and any outstanding safety recall, and finally the rates you have saved. Red means expired or non-compliant, amber means due in the next 30 days, green means in date, and Not known means you have not set it. Not known is never a failure. Facts that come from a government record carry a small note saying so, "from the DVSA record" or "from the DVLA". Where the car has been checked, a line underneath says when the government record was last read.

A rate nudge appears when this month's hires on the car say something real: booked 85% of the month or more suggests the rate could go up, and a car that has not been out at all this month suggests promoting it or reviewing the rate. It stays quiet when there is nothing to say.

Under the facts, on a laptop, are the buttons for working on the car: Pricing, Dates (it reads Set insurance and tax, or Update dates, when something needs doing), Service log, Documents, Add expense, and Take off the road. Hire history and MOT history open the full timelines, and a government check button brings the record up to date.

The rate card

Tap the car to open its record, then choose Pricing. On a phone, open the car and choose Edit vehicle, where Pricing is the first section. Three figures, all optional:

• Daily rate. Set it and a new booking for this car quotes its own hire price from the rate and the number of days.
• Weekly rate. Applied to whole weeks on hires of seven days or more, so a long hire is not priced as seven separate days.
• Default deposit. Dropped into the deposit field on every new booking for this car.

Every one of these is a starting figure, never a lock. The quote on a booking is always yours to type over. Leave a field blank and it clears to not set, which is honest: a car with no rate simply asks you for the price. See Create a booking.

Compliance: two halves, and the split is the point

Open the car and choose Dates, and a sheet titled Compliance opens with two sections rather than one form. That is deliberate, and it is the reason the record stands up when somebody argues with it.

Read from the government record, at the top: the MOT, from the DVSA's own record for the registration, with its expiry and when it was last checked. There is no box to type an MOT into. The only way it moves is the government check button sitting under it, which is named for the service that answers it.

An operator typing an MOT date would be asserting a fact the government record might disagree with, inside the one product whose whole pitch is evidence that holds up in an insurer's hands. So KeyProof refuses it outright and says why, rather than accepting the date and quietly dropping it. What you show an insurer is what the DVSA record says, not what somebody remembered.

Yours to keep up to date, underneath: the insurance expiry, the tax expiry, the next service date, whether the car is ULEZ compliant, the insurer and the policy number. Each is yours, so a typed fact is never dressed up as a checked one. One exception works in your favour: a battery-electric car reads as ULEZ compliant from its stored government fuel type, and your own answer always beats the derivation. Leave anything blank if you do not track it yet: blank reads as not set, never as a guessed date.

Tax is worth being plain about. Only the DVLA holds it, and the DVLA's vehicle enquiry service is closed to new connections, so KeyProof cannot look a car's tax up for you. The tax expiry is therefore yours to type, from the V5C or your DVLA reminder, on the same footing as insurance and service, and the sheet labels it as yours. The MOT is different: that comes from the DVSA's own record and is never typed.

On a phone

Fleet on a phone is a list of cars with the count of active cars, cars on hire and cars due back today at the top. Tap a car for its own screen: this month's hires, the next booking, four figures (Mileage, MOT, Insurance and Deposit default), its upcoming bookings and any note you have kept. Edit vehicle is one screen with Pricing, the dates you keep, power and gearbox, vehicle notes, and a switch for taking the car off the road. The MOT and mileage are read from the DVSA record and are not editable.

Every car runs the same checks

There is no Premium tick box on a car any more, and no tier of car inside your fleet. Every car you add runs the full evidence treatment on every hire: the named set of 6 condition shots at handover and again at return, four extra terms the hirer ticks before signing, and a deposit expected before the keys move (an override is logged). It is allowed on every plan and does not change what you pay. See The full evidence treatment on every hire.

Service log, documents and costs

On a laptop the rest of the buttons are the car's paperwork. Service log records what was done, when, at what mileage and cost. Documents keeps your own copies of the V5C, the insurance certificate and the MOT certificate, as an image or a PDF. Add expense logs a running cost against this car. All three are added here, per car, and read back across the whole fleet: the service log and documents in Fleet, Maintenance, and the costs in Money, Expenses. See Compliance, service log and renewals.

Taking a car off the road

Take off the road offers to record a reason in a few words. From then on new bookings for that car are refused until you put it back, and the card says so. Hires already booked are untouched. On a phone the same switch is on the Edit vehicle screen.

A car's evidence history

Hire history on a car lists every hire it has been out on: the reference, the dates, the hirer, the status, whether a dispute was raised, how many handover and return photos exist, and a link straight into that hire's record. It is the quickest way to answer "what has this car been through", which is exactly the question an insurer asks about a repeat problem.

Removing a car

Removing is owner only: Remove car at the foot of the record on a laptop, Archive vehicle on a phone. A car that has carried a booking, a payment, evidence or a sealed record is archived rather than erased: it leaves your fleet list and stops being bookable, and every record that used it is untouched. A car with no history at all is removed outright. Bookings that used it keep their records exactly as they are, because a hire's record is not allowed to change after the fact.

Your plan sets how many cars it covers, and that limit is a guide rather than a shutter: go over it and nothing switches off, you are simply nudged to move up. See Your plan, price and billing.