Fleet maintenance planner and VOR records. The office side, on one screen.

Plenty of what goes wrong in a maintenance investigation starts in the office, not the workshop. An inspection slips because nobody saw it coming. A coach goes out on a VOR. The tacho calibration runs out on a vehicle that spends half the year in the shed. None of it is hard to manage. It just needs to be in front of someone every morning.

What the guidance expects

DVSA’s guide to maintaining roadworthiness says planning systems should set safety inspection dates at least six months ahead, and should include test dates and other calibration dates, such as tachographs and lifting equipment. Records of safety inspections must be kept for at least 15 months, including for vehicles that have left the licence or been sold. For computerised systems it expects records that cannot be changed later, a clear record of who checked what, a full audit trail and hard copies on request.

In a maintenance investigation, the examiner asks whether there is an effective forward planning system in use and whether off the road vehicles are properly controlled, comparing VOR records against what the vehicles were actually doing. Our guide to safety inspection intervals covers how to set the intervals in the first place.

The fleet board

The fleet board is the first screen the office sees. It shows vehicles off the road, inspections due and overdue, open defects and open actions. It also shows the dates coming up for MOT, tachograph calibration, vehicle tax and LOLER inspections on passenger lifts. Nothing on it needs digging for.

Forward planner and calendar

Each vehicle has its own inspection interval, and the forward planner lays out the inspections ahead from there. A calendar feed puts them in Outlook or Google Calendar, so the people booking work see the same dates as the people signing sheets. The maintenance investigation self-check checks the planner actually covers six months ahead, which is easy to let slip without noticing.

VOR records and the release rule

When a vehicle goes off the road, PSVault records the date and the reason. The guidance lets you suspend the inspection schedule for a vehicle while it is off the road, but a vehicle that has missed a planned inspection can only come back into service after a safety inspection confirms it is roadworthy.

PSVault applies that as a release rule. It works out which planned inspections were missed while the vehicle was off the road, so the office knows a safety inspection is due before it goes back into service. The point is that a coach laid up for the winter does not quietly reappear on a school run in March with its last inspection dated October.

Dates, documents and plates

• MOT, tacho calibration, tax and LOLER dates per vehicle, all feeding the fleet board.
• Vehicle documents held against the vehicle: certificates, LOLER reports and tachograph calibration certificates.
• Registration changes. When a vehicle changes plate, its history stays joined up, so the inspections, defects and prohibitions from before the change are still on the same file.

Fuel and AdBlue

Fuel cards, fuel fills by vehicle and by card, and weekly fuel prices all sit in PSVault. It also compares AdBlue use with diesel and flags ratios that look wrong. The maintenance investigation asks whether you monitor emissions control systems, and monitoring fuel and AdBlue use is one of the things the guidance lists. A vehicle using far less AdBlue than its diesel suggests is worth a look.

The garage screen

A wall screen in the garage shows what is in, what is due and what is waiting. Technicians see the same picture as the office without having to ask.

Read-only logins and the audit trail

A transport consultant or auditor can have a read-only login. They can look at anything and print it, but they cannot change a thing.

Every compliance-relevant change goes into an audit trail. Nothing is deleted. If someone makes a mistake, the record is voided with the reason and the name of the person who voided it, and the original stays on file. An examiner looking at an electronic system wants to know records cannot be quietly rewritten. This is how PSVault answers that. There is more on retention in our guide to maintenance records and what to keep.

How it feeds the self-check

The office records are where a lot of the self-check evidence comes from: late inspections and whether a VOR covered them, how far ahead the planner runs, the VOR records themselves. Keep the fleet office straight and the answers to those questions look after themselves. Let it drift and the self-check will tell you, along with the safety inspection sheets it affects.