Assets and duty cycles
Alongside vehicles, a fleet includes non-vehicle assets — trailers, containers, forklifts, generators, compressors and tools. The same module that records them also defines the duty-cycle profiles used to plan maintenance, and provides the fleet utilization view, which catches vehicles sitting idle.
Who it's for
The fleet manager and organization administrator register and update assets and create duty-cycle profiles. The maintenance manager co-owns profiles and uses them when planning service; the safety manager, alongside maintenance and fleet managers, can also manually ground or restore a vehicle. The finance controller records the cost entries that build a vehicle's TCO.
Key concepts
A duty cycle is how you measure an asset's usage — by mileage, by engine-hour count, or both. A duty-cycle profile ties that measure to a threshold (e.g. every so many kilometres or engine-hours), which feeds maintenance schedules and expected wear.
Asset register
You register an asset with a serial number, a name and a category (trailer, container, forklift, generator, compressor, tool or other), assigning it to a site and optionally to a fleet group. The asset's status — in service, out of service, in storage, disposed — controls its operational availability, the same way a vehicle's status does.
The same backend module also keeps the manually-recorded cost entries that feed a vehicle's total cost of ownership — a date, an amount and a category such as tolls, tyres or one-off fees, entered by hand by the finance controller or fleet manager. Fuel, charging and service costs are never typed in here: they reach the total automatically from the fuel, EV and maintenance modules, so only a cost with no module of its own is recorded by hand. Depreciation, lease instalments and recurring fixed costs (insurance, tax, subscriptions) are automatic in the same way — they come from the vehicle's acquisition record and its list of fixed costs (see Vehicles) and are never typed in as a manual entry either, and neither are a fine on a compliance infringement or a claim's cost to the fleet, which reach the total from the compliance and insurance modules instead (see HOS clocks and duty status and Insurance & risk). Downtime — a vehicle being off the road for repair — is the one category that can be either: recorded by hand here as a one-off cost, or, once the organization sets a downtime rate per hour in its organization settings, computed automatically from work-order time instead, which turns off manual entry for it. They all add up on the vehicle's detail page.
Duty-cycle profiles
A duty-cycle profile defines a name, a measurement basis (mileage, engine-hours, or both) and thresholds (kilometres and/or engine-hours) past which an asset or vehicle qualifies for service. A profile assigned to a vehicle feeds both preventive maintenance schedules and the expected wear rate shown on the vehicle detail page.
Fleet utilization
The utilization view is an on-demand snapshot: for a given no-activity threshold in days (default 30), the system flags vehicles with no recent data as "ghosts" — potentially idle or abandoned assets running up cost without doing work. The view shows the total vehicle count, the number of ghosts caught, and, per vehicle, its status, current odometer reading and last-activity date.
In the background
A vehicle's roadworthiness is automatically withdrawn when an inspection reports an open safety-affecting defect — the grounded vehicle is excluded from dispatch assignments until the defect is repaired and certified, or roadworthiness is restored manually by a maintenance or safety role.