How do vehicles and the tool crib work?
Who drives which truck, how far it went and for what, the pre-trip check, what is coming due — and who has the torque wrench, the ladder and the megger.
Your admin or a manager adds each vehicle under Vehicles & tools with its unit number, VIN, plate, a service interval in miles or months, and the dates its registration and insurance run out. Each vehicle has one driver at a time — anyone on your staff, from the owner to a new technician, never an AI assistant. A pool vehicle has no driver and anyone on staff can take it. The Vehicles page shows what is coming due: service by the odometer or the calendar, and registration or insurance running out within 30 days.
Drivers log their trips from My vehicle in field mode: the day, the odometer at the start and at the end, what the trip was for, and the job if it was one. It works with no signal — the trip is saved on the tablet and sent when the signal is back, and sending it twice still records it once. The odometer only goes up: a trip cannot start below where the last one ended. A trip is never edited; the driver or a manager adds a correction with a reason, and the original stays next to it.
The pre-trip check is a fixed list — brakes, steering, tires, lights, seatbelts, the load, and the smaller items. If a critical item fails, the vehicle is out of service at once, nobody can log a trip in it, and a follow-up lands with the office. Your admin or a manager puts it back in service with a note saying what was fixed.
The tool crib holds every tagged tool — torque wrenches, ladders, PPE, cameras — with its condition and where it lives. Each tool's QR sticker opens the checkout screen: anyone on staff checks a tool out to themselves, and the crib's keepers (your admin, a manager, or a job's project manager or supervisor) hand tools to others. Your test instruments are checked out from the same screen, straight from the instrument register; a meter that is lost, retired or out for calibration cannot go out. One person has a thing at a time. When something comes back damaged or does not come back, a keeper records it with a note — and for a test instrument, the admin or a manager does, and the instrument register says lost too.
Your own people see the fleet and the crib. Trips and pre-trip checks are seen by the driver and by your admin and managers — not by other technicians. Clients, subcontractors and vendors see none of it, not even a tool checked out to their own job.
- My trip was refused — the odometer is lower
- Someone logged a later trip first, or a reading was mistyped. Check the last trip on the vehicle's page; the driver or a manager can correct it with a reason.
- The truck is out of service and I need it
- Only your admin or a manager can put it back, with a note saying what was fixed. Until then, take a pool vehicle.
- Someone left with a tool
- A keeper checks it in as lost with where it was last seen. The checkout stays on the record with who had it.