The system that keeps your fleet legal

One database, one planner on the wall, and one person who keeps both right.

A typical business running one of these has 30 to 100 vehicles and trailers across one or two operating centres, a transport manager, a compliance clerk who owns it, and a workshop with two or three fitters or a maintenance contractor, handling 30 to 100 walkaround checks a day and eight to fifteen safety inspections a week. Whether it was started in 2007 or 2019, it does the same job, and the licence rests on it the same way.

Many fleets buy a maintenance package instead. This page is about the records kept in-house, or beside a package that never fitted.

In the clerk's words, it holds the vehicle register with each unit's inspection interval, MOT, tax, tachograph calibration and insurance dates. The planner shows inspections by week, coloured by hand. Inspection sheets come back from the workshop and get keyed in, defects found and work done; the drivers' defect books come in with the keys, or the checks sit in a walkaround app nobody connected, and both get keyed too. Driver records have their own screen: licence checks, CPC, card expiry, medicals. The reports feed the monthly review and the folder printed when DVSA rings.

The rules it keeps are the ones the licence rests on:

• Inspection intervals differ by vehicle, six weeks for units, eight for trailers, four for one that had a prohibition, and only the system knows which.
• A safety-critical defect takes the vehicle off the road until a fitter signs it off, and the traffic desk sees it as unavailable at once.
• A driver with points above a threshold has the licence checked quarterly, not twice a year.
• Vehicle units are downloaded every 90 days and driver cards every 28, counted from the last download, not the calendar.

The licence undertakings say what must happen. The system says how this fleet does it.

Started in Microsoft Access between 2005 and 2010 by the transport manager of the day, on top of an Excel forward planner that never went away, and extended a table at a time for the driver records and the tachograph download dates. The data moved to SQL Server when the file corrupted once too often, or when the dispatch system moved and took it along; in some offices it is still an Access file. It runs on the compliance clerk's PC, with the planner printed and pinned to the wall behind it, and there is no accounts link because nobody ever needed one.

The person who built it has retired. The firm that supports the office PCs keeps the machine running and leaves the database well alone, so nothing in it has changed for years. It cannot be opened from the workshop or the yard, the drivers' checks reach it on paper, and the planner is coloured by hand.

The same records built between 2016 and 2022, usually by a freelancer or a small agency, as a web system in React, Angular or Node or PHP with a drivers' app in React Native or Ionic, or put together in Power Apps or Zoho Creator by a transport manager who learnt the tool on the job. The drivers do their walkaround on a phone, the workshop has a tablet, the planner is a screen instead of a wall, and the transport manager opens it from home.

The intervals broke it first. The freelancer wrote six weeks for units and eight for trailers into the code, so the vehicle on four weeks after a prohibition lives on a sticky note beside the screen. The drivers' app has not been updated since 2022, and since 31 August 2026 Google Play will not take an update unless it targets Android 16, which nobody is left to do. New starters whose phones will not run it are back on the paper book. Since 2023 a few transport managers have had another go with an AI app builder, and the result stalled at the records an examiner would ask for. Younger than the Access database, it leaves the licence records just as stuck.

The O-licence, and a fleet the transport manager can see in one screen.

An operator's licence is a promise to keep records, and this is where the promise is kept. When an examiner asks for a vehicle's history, the clerk produces fifteen months of inspections, defects and repairs from one screen and one drawer. The transport manager opens it each morning and sees what is due, what is overdue and what is off the road, which is most of the job in one view.

Defects are closed with a name against them. The driver reported it, the fitter fixed it, the date is there, and that chain is what an examiner follows.

The driver screen answers the insurer without a search through files, and the whole thing has kept a fleet of this size legal for a decade without a software bill.

The records are right. The way they get there is the problem.

DVSA cannot read it. Earned Recognition needs the maintenance and drivers' hours data to come from a system DVSA has validated, and an Access database with a coloured spreadsheet is not one. So the fleet is stopped at the roadside like any other, and a visit means printing everything for a week beforehand.

The walkaround check is on paper, or as good as. On the older system it always was; on the newer one it is again, for every driver whose phone the app will not install on. Where the fleet bought a walkaround app, the checks sit on the app's own website and the clerk keys the defects across. The defect book comes back with the keys, the defect reaches the workshop when someone reads it, and the repair is a signature on a carbon copy. The gap between a nil-defect check on Monday and a tyre found on Tuesday's inspection is the gap an examiner asks about.

The PC it runs on lost Windows 10 support in October 2025. The IT company will replace the machine but will not put Access on the new one, and the planner's macros only ran on the old Office. The workaround is to leave the old PC on and not touch it.

The planner is a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet is a person. The forward planner is coloured by the compliance clerk, and nobody else reads the colours. An inspection that slips is found at the next visit, not in the office.

The same records, with the drivers, the workshop and the planner feeding them without the paper.

Each of these grows out of something the system already does.

Drivers' checks straight into the vehicle record. The walkaround app the fleet already uses, or a bought one, sends each check and defect into the vehicle's record and onto the workshop's list, timestamped with its photo, the nil-defect recorded as firmly as the fault. Only where there is no app does a simple phone check write into the same database.

A planner that plans itself. Each vehicle's interval in data, so inspections, MOTs, calibrations and tachograph downloads land on one planner that nobody colours in. What is due next week is a question the screen answers.

The examiner's folder on screen. Fifteen months of inspections, defects and repairs per vehicle, shown, exported or sent in an afternoon, and held in a shape a recognised system could take.

Defects closed with evidence. Photo, part, fitter and time on each one, and repeat defects visible by vehicle and by driver, which is what the monthly review is for.

Driver records with reminders. Licence, CPC, card and medical dates on the same planner, with the points rule that sets the check frequency kept as it is.

Off the old PC, and off the hosting account. The screens opened in a browser by the transport manager from the yard or the workshop, on a supported database the business controls, with a backup that has been restored.

None of this switches the database off, whichever generation it is. It gets added to, and the old screens stay open until they are empty.

In the workshop's paperwork, the drivers' checks that all look alike, and the monthly review nobody has time to write.

The judgement stays with the transport manager. AI takes the reading:

Inspection sheets and brake test printouts read into the record. The contractor's sheet comes back as a PDF or a photo of a carbon copy, with the brake test printout stapled to it, and the clerk keys the defects found, the work done and the brake figures. AI reads both into the record, defects listed and figures in the right boxes, for the clerk to check against the sheet. At eight to fifteen inspections a week and a quarter of an hour's keying each, the clerk typically gets two to four hours a week back.

Checks that do not fit the pattern. Once the 30 to 100 walkaround checks a day reach the record, AI reads them against what the fitters find. A driver who has reported nil defects for three months on a unit that keeps failing its inspection, or a check finished in under a minute, is flagged for the transport manager to take up with the driver. The half hour a day of reading down the list typically comes down to the few that stand out.

The monthly review drafted from the data. Inspections done on time, defects by vehicle and by driver, repeat faults and overdue downloads, drafted from the system's own records for the transport manager to read, correct and sign. Gathered by hand from a month of inspections and a thousand or more checks, that is typically most of a day back.

Not worth doing: AI predicting breakdowns for a fleet this size. The inspection interval and the fitter's judgement already do it, and no transport manager would put the licence behind a guess.

An examiner can ask where any figure came from, so AI waits until the first stage has made the records safe to change. The assessment maps where AI would pay back on this fleet's records.

Stabilise first, then the drivers' checks, with the old screens as the fallback throughout.

1. Stabilise. The Access file and the planner under version control, or the agency's code found and recovered, the data on a database version that is still supported, a backup restored on purpose, a test copy, and the old screens kept working on a supported PC. First because the licence depends on the records existing tomorrow, and the Windows 10 machine is the thing most likely to stop.
2. The drivers' checks into the record. The walkaround app the fleet already uses, or a bought one, connected so its checks and defects reach the vehicle record and the workshop's list the same day. Only where there is no app is a phone check added, writing into the same database. The paper books stay in the cabs until the drivers stop using them.
3. The planner from data. Intervals and dates out of the spreadsheet and the Access code into tables, the planner generated from them and still printed for the wall.
4. The transport manager's screens in a browser, the examiner's export and the driver records, each a stage priced on its own.
5. Retire the old screens and the spreadsheet when nothing depends on them. The last thing to go is usually the printed planner on the wall.

The assessment is from £395 + VAT, sized on a free one-hour consultation, with an exact price before you commit. For a compliance system that means a few days with the transport manager, the clerk and the workshop, finding where each interval and rule lives and what the examiner has asked for before, and a report with costed options and a fixed price for each. Each stage after that is priced before you commit to it. How we work, what drives the price and the payment terms each have a page, and so does each technology the system is built on: Microsoft Access, the spreadsheet beside it and SQL Server, and for the newer generation React, Angular and Node, old PHP and the drivers' app in React Native or Ionic.