Keeping track of vehicle inspection, insurance and servicing across a fleet

You find out the vehicle inspection has expired when the driver rings you from the roadside. Not before — because the certificate is in the glovebox of a van that is somewhere else, and nothing about it is due to remind anybody.

With three vans it is manageable in somebody's head. With eight, it is not, and the first sign that it was not is a fine.

The paperwork nobody owns#

Vehicle documents have a peculiar failure mode: everybody assumes somebody else is watching them. In Romania a company vehicle carries several with independent expiry dates:

• ITP — the periodic technical inspection, the Romanian equivalent of a roadworthiness test.
• RCA — compulsory third-party motor insurance.
• CASCO — optional comprehensive cover, where the firm carries it.
• Servicing — by interval or mileage, and easiest of all to let slide.

Each has its own date, and none of them lands in the same month. A wall calendar works right up until the day nobody looks at it.

A van is a warehouse on wheels#

The reason fleet lives beside storage in ToolFlux rather than in a separate module: a vehicle has contents, it has somebody responsible for it, and it has paperwork. Treating it as a location rather than as a list means the tools inside it are tracked by the same rules as tools in a depot.

The reminder runs on the server#

This is the part that decides whether the feature works. The expiry check is a scheduled job that runs every morning regardless of who opens the app — not a notification the phone raises when somebody happens to open the right screen.

The escalation after expiry is the part most systems leave out. A single reminder on the day is easy to miss, and after that the calendar has nothing more to say — while the exposure grows every day.

Cost per vehicle, as a by-product#

Once services and repairs are recorded against a vehicle rather than against a general expense line, the question „which van is costing us the most" becomes answerable. Usually the answer is not the one people expect: the oldest van is rarely the most expensive, and the one that is always in the workshop is often quite new.

One deliberate limitation: the app tracks the documents and their dates. It does not book the inspection, file the insurance or talk to any authority. Everything here is about knowing in time, not about doing it for you.

The tools riding in the van move with it through transfers between sites, and a vehicle’s service costs land in the same reports as a tool’s — see repair or replace.