Vehicles
The vehicles module is the register of your fleet — from registering a vehicle, through its current status and site assignment, to a full detail page with service history, documents and costs. The vehicle detail page collects, in one place, the data that feeds the other modules: maintenance, compliance, dispatch and analytics.
Who it's for
The fleet manager and organization administrator manage the register; the dispatcher, maintenance manager and finance controller use the vehicle detail page in their own workflows. Which vehicles you see depends on the site scope attached to your membership (see Sites and scoping).
Register and statuses
You register a vehicle with its core identifying data (plate number, VIN, make and model) and assign it to a site. The vehicle's status (e.g. active, in service, decommissioned) controls whether it's available for dispatch and maintenance plans. Changing status is an explicit action — the change history stays in the system.
Vehicle detail page
The vehicle detail page brings together:
- Technical data and assignments — site, drivers, linked telematics device.
- Documents — policies, registration inspections and other files with expiry dates; expiring documents raise alerts (see Documents).
- Fault codes (DTCs) — active diagnostic codes reported by telematics, with the option to acknowledge them; open codes are flagged on the vehicle list.
- TCO — total cost of ownership: fuel, charging and maintenance costs are added automatically from their own modules; tolls and other one-off costs are recorded by hand; a vehicle's acquisition record (below) adds depreciation or lease instalments for the finance roles; recurring fixed costs — insurance, tax, subscriptions (see Fixed costs below) — accrue every month automatically, with no hand entry needed each period; a fine recorded against a detected compliance infringement (see HOS clocks and duty status) and a claim's cost to the fleet recorded on a claim package (see Insurance & risk) are added automatically too, each on the vehicle it was recorded against; and downtime — the cost of a vehicle being off the road for repair — is recorded by hand as a one-off cost by default, or, once the organization sets a downtime rate per hour in its organization settings, computed automatically from work-order time instead — the two are exclusive, and switching the rate on turns every hand-typed downtime entry already on file into a superseded row the automatic figure replaces.
- Cost per kilometre / engine hour — the vehicle's unit cost over a chosen window (the last 30, 90 or 365 days, or a custom date range), computed from distance or from engine hours — whichever the vehicle's duty-cycle basis names — together with the meter's source (the telematics device's own odometer, a fuel-pump odometer, the trip log, or — when the meter has gone backwards — a note that it's inconsistent rather than a wrong number). Below 50 km, or 5 engine hours, in the window the unit cost isn't shown at all — too little use to make a rate comparable — and the screen says why.
- Maintenance prediction trend — predicted service need from the predictive maintenance module.
Acquisition and financing
A vehicle's acquisition record is what its ownership cost is computed from: how it was bought or leased decides which of two cost models applies, and a vehicle with no record contributes no depreciation and no instalment to its own total.
- Purchase — depreciates on a straight line: (purchase price − residual value) spread evenly over the useful life you set, one month at a time.
- Finance lease, operating lease or rental — the monthly instalment is the cost, for every month of the term, plus a one-off initial payment on the acquisition date. There is no depreciation on a lease: the instalment already is the vehicle's cash cost, and adding a depreciation figure on top of it would count the same money twice.
The ownership cost — depreciation or lease instalments — is visible only to the finance controller, the executive and the organization administrator; the fleet manager and maintenance manager see the operating cost alone, with no gap or placeholder where the ownership figure would sit. The vehicle page and the fleet-wide costs screen both label their total accordingly — "Total cost" for the finance roles, "Operating cost" for everyone else; only Analytics → Costs additionally shows which level that is, as its own pill — "Level: cost of ownership" or "Level: operating cost" — and the cost per kilometre / engine hour follows whichever total the viewer is looking at.
Fixed costs
The Fixed costs section on the vehicle detail page lists its recurring charges — insurance, tax, subscriptions (telematics, a toll-transponder plan) and anything else that's billed on a schedule rather than incurred once. Each entry has a kind (Insurance, Tax, Subscription, Other), an amount, a currency, a billing period (Monthly, Quarterly, Annual), a start date and an optional end date — no end date means "until cancelled".
The amount always accrues into the cost total evenly every month, regardless of its billing period: an annual premium is divided by 12, a quarterly one by 3, and a monthly one enters the total in full. An annual policy paid in a single month therefore doesn't load that whole month's cost — if it did, a ranking of vehicles by monthly cost would favor whichever ones happened to have their renewal fall outside the chosen window, instead of showing their actual running cost.
Insurance and tax add to the cost of ownership — visible only to the finance controller, the executive and the organization administrator, the same as depreciation and lease instalments (see Acquisition and financing above). Subscriptions and other fixed costs add to the operating cost, visible to every role that uses the vehicle detail page. Only the finance controller and organization administrator can add, edit or delete a fixed cost; every other role sees the list with no actions on it.
Comparing costs across the fleet
To compare vehicles against each other — not just look at one at a time — open Analytics → Costs. That screen ranks the whole fleet by what it costs to move over a chosen window: converted cost, distance and engine hours, broken down by vehicle, fleet group, site and vehicle class. A group's cost is its members' total cost divided by their total distance (never the average of their individual rates), so one expensive-to-run vehicle doesn't skew the whole group's reading.
In the background
Telematics keeps the vehicle's mileage and position up to date continuously, and new fault codes generate a notification for the maintenance roles. Expiring vehicle documents are checked daily and flagged ahead of time in the notification center.