Adding cars, rates and compliance

Fleet, Vehicles: add a car from its registration alone, look it up against the DVSA MOT record, set its rate card, and keep the insurance, service and ULEZ details only you can know.

Fleet is where your cars live, and its Vehicles view, headed "Your 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 queue on your Today screen is actually watching.

Adding one car

1. Go to Fleet, then the Vehicles view.
2. Put the registration in and tap Look up. 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.
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. 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 at once" 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.

What each car card shows

The card face is the button: tap anywhere on it and that car's record opens underneath. The face stays short on purpose, so a screen of cars reads at a glance. It carries the plate and the vehicle name, an "All legal" stamp when nothing is outstanding, one status line (days out and revenue this month, and the daily rate where you have set one), and any attention chips: red for a date that has passed, amber for one falling due soon.

What opens when you tap a car

• The DVLA line, once the car has been checked: MOT valid or the status the DVLA gave, a warning when the MOT falls due in the next 14 days, taxed or the status the DVLA gave, and how long ago it was checked.
• The DVSA line, kept separate and labelled "from the DVSA" because it comes from a different agency: the MOT expiry on the record, the mileage at the last test, anything the tester noted, and an outstanding safety recall. Choose MOT history for the full timeline.
• The compliance strip: MOT, Insurance, Tax, Service and ULEZ, each green when it is clear, amber when it falls in the next 30 days, red when it has passed, and neutral when you have not set it. Neutral means not set, never a failure.
• Its saved rates, when you have set them.
• An occasional rate nudge, worked out from this month's hires on that car: 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 real to say.
• Manage: Pricing, Compliance, Service log, Documents and Expense, plus the hire history and the MOT timeline where the car has one.

Above the list, once any car has been checked with the DVLA, the badge sums the fleet up: how many vehicles, how many are road legal, and how many need attention. A search box appears once you are running more than eight cars.

The rate card

Tap the car to open its record, then choose Pricing under Manage. 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 Compliance under Manage, and you get 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 tax expiry, insurance expiry, the insurer and policy number, the next service date, and whether the car is ULEZ compliant. Each is labelled as recorded by you, 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.

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 nine-shot condition set at handover and again at return, four extra terms the hirer ticks before signing, and a deposit recorded before the keys move. 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

The rest of Manage is 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. 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.

A car's evidence history

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. The car comes off your fleet list along with its saved rates, compliance dates and documents. 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.