Compliance, service log and renewals

Fleet, Compliance and Fleet, Maintenance: what is expired or due soon, the six months of renewals ahead, and the service history and documents behind each car.

The Fleet room holds two views beside the Vehicles register, one tap apart, and they answer two questions that sound alike and are not. Compliance looks forward: can this car legally go out. Maintenance looks backward: what has been done to it. Nothing is added in either view: a date, a service, a document or a cost is recorded against a car in Fleet, Vehicles, and these are where it all reads back together. See Adding cars, rates and compliance.

Needs attention, in Compliance

The card at the top of Compliance is the legal-to-hire queue: every car with something expired or falling due in the next 30 days, worst first, with the specific problem spelled out ("MOT expired", "insurance due in 6 days", "ULEZ non-compliant"). Open car takes you to Vehicles to fix it. With cars on file and nothing outstanding it says every car is legal to hire, which is a genuine answer rather than a blank list; with no cars on file yet it says that instead, because a clean bill of health on a fleet that does not exist would be a lie.

It reads the same dates as the Fleet attention card on your Today screen, so the two never disagree.

Renewals, next six months

Needs attention only looks 30 days ahead, which means three MOTs landing in the same fortnight are invisible until that fortnight arrives. Under it, the renewals view is the six months after: every MOT, insurance, tax and service date you have set, grouped by the month it falls in, with anything already past in its own Overdue row and anything beyond the window in Later.

That is a planning tool, not a warning. Two big renewals in one month is worth knowing about in March rather than in the week they arrive.

• ULEZ is deliberately left out. It is a compliant or not compliant flag with no date on it, so it can never sit on a calendar.
• Dates you have never set are reported separately, as a gap in the record rather than a date in the future. A missing date cannot be scheduled, and pretending otherwise would hide the very cars you have not looked at.
• With fewer than three dated items the numbers are printed as a sentence instead of drawn. A bar chart of two things is the list again.

Service log, in Maintenance

Every service, repair and MOT you have recorded against any car, newest first, with the car, the date, the mileage and the cost. Add one in Fleet, Vehicles: tap the car, then Service log under Manage. What was done, the date, and optionally the cost, the mileage and a note such as the garage name.

The cost on a service entry is your service history. It does not create a running cost by itself. If you want it counted in profit per car, log it as a cost too, which is why the same figure is never double-counted behind your back.

Documents

Every vehicle document stored across the fleet, with the car it belongs to and a View link that opens the stored file. Upload them per car by tapping the car and choosing Documents under Manage: V5C, insurance certificate, MOT certificate or anything else, as an image or a PDF. Where document storage has not been switched on yet, the uploader says so rather than failing silently.

Running costs

Maintenance keeps one honest summary line: what you have logged across the fleet all time, with a jump to the page that owns the rows. The full log, month by month and per car, lives in Money, Expenses. Those costs are what turn revenue per car into true profit per car in Money, Insights, and every one lands in the accounting export in Money, Payments.