Vehicles and the daily check

Vehicles is a company-level module, off by default for a company with no vans and on by default for everyone, the same switch every other optional subsystem in CleanFlo uses (Modules). Turning it off hides the screen and the cleaner app’s My Vehicle row entirely; nothing recorded is deleted, and switching it back on restores the register exactly as it was left.

The register

The page is titled Vehicles, with one action, Add vehicle. Four figures sit under the title and double as filters: how many vehicles are on the register, how many are active, how many are off road, and how many have an expiry due or overdue. Tap any tile to narrow the table to it.

The search box matches registration, make, model or the name of anyone currently assigned, so typing a driver’s name finds their van as readily as typing the plate. A registration is stored uppercase with the spaces stripped, so ln21 xyz and LN21XYZ are the same vehicle and the register refuses to hold the same plate twice.

Adding a vehicle

Body type is Van, Car, Pickup, Trailer or Other; fuel type is Diesel, Petrol, Electric, Hybrid or Plug-in hybrid. Neither drives anything else in the product: they are there to sort and search the register, the same way Equipment’s category is a label and nothing more.

Who has it, and it can be more than one person

Open a vehicle and its Assignment tab shows everyone who currently has it. A vehicle can carry a named keeper (the answer to “who was driving” when a PCN letter arrives three weeks later naming a date) and any number of other people alongside them, for a pool van the depot shares. The one rule the database enforces is the exclusive one: a vehicle can have at most one keeper at a time. Nothing caps how many other people are assigned, and nothing caps how many vehicles one person is assigned to.

Ending someone’s assignment is its own button on their own row, so unassigning Arun never touches Sarah’s. Every assignment that has ever ended stays on the vehicle’s history: nothing is deleted, because the history is what answers a question about a date in the past.

MOT, tax and insurance

Three dates, each shown as a chip that reads In date, Due soon (within 14 days), Overdue, or Not on file when nothing has been entered. The wording is deliberate everywhere it appears: a screen says MOT recorded as expiring in 9 days, never this vehicle is legal. Nothing in CleanFlo can know that: the date on screen is only ever what somebody typed in, and it is wrong the moment a real MOT slips without the record being updated to match.

The walk-around check

A daily DVSA-style walk-around, filed from the cleaner app rather than by an office. Sixteen items grouped into Exterior, Tyres & wheels, Glass & visibility, Inside the cab, Load area and Fluids: lights, tyre tread, mirrors, the horn, warning lights on the dash, whether the load is secure, and so on. Each is marked Pass, Fail or N/A.

Marking anything a Fail asks two more things there and then: a one-line note on what is wrong, and whether the van can still be driven: Yes, but it needs fixing or No, it should not be driven. The check’s own overall result is never typed in by the driver; it is worked out from the worst answer given. One item marked “should not be driven” makes the whole check read that way, even if every other item passed.

Filing a check does not stop a shift. There is no lock-out: a company can require checks in principle, but a driver who has not yet filed one today can still clock in: a cleaner stranded outside a client’s house unable to start work is a worse failure than a van driven with an unchecked wing mirror. A check marked should not be driven raises an alert to the owner and flags the vehicle, rather than physically stopping anyone.

Like every other write in the cleaner app, a check queues through the offline outbox. Filed in a basement car park with no signal, it sends itself the moment the phone reconnects, in the same order it was filed. The whole screen is translated into all 27 of the cleaner app’s languages.

Defects and damage are two different things

A defect is a fault: a note, a severity, and eventually a rectification. Most come off a walk-around check, but a driver can also report one mid-shift without waiting for the next morning’s check. A damage report is an event: a date, a location, a description, and room for a third party, an insurer and a claim reference once one exists. The two are kept apart on purpose: a scuffed bumper that will never be booked in for a repair is still worth recording as damage, without CleanFlo inventing a fault ticket that will sit open forever.

Every defect is visible to the whole company, not just the owner: the point of filing one is that somebody else reads it. Marking one rectified is an owner action, from the vehicle’s own Defects & damage tab.

Service history

A plain log, in the same spirit as Equipment’s Maintenance tab: date, kind (Service, Repair, MOT, Tyres or Other), odometer reading, what was done, who did it, and the cost. Logging a service with an odometer reading higher than the one already on file moves the vehicle’s own recorded odometer forward automatically: the figure on the register always comes from a real event, a check or a service, rather than being typed in by hand and left to drift.

What Vehicles does not do

It is not a running-cost ledger. Fuel, insurance premiums and repair invoices are not recorded against a vehicle here: that is business expense tracking, a separate part of CleanFlo, and a vehicle’s service cost field is what was quoted for the work, not a receipt. It does not book an MOT, does not hold an operator’s licence, and does not do anything a tachograph would: CleanFlo assumes vans and cars, not HGVs.