Haulage & logistics
Fleet compliance software for haulage operators.
An operator licence is a set of promises about how your vehicles are run. This is where you keep the evidence that you kept them.
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Haulage carries the heaviest compliance burden of any transport sector, and the consequence of getting it wrong is the business itself: an operator without a licence has no lawful way to move a vehicle, and the people who signed the undertakings carry that outcome personally.
What makes it hard is not that the rules are unknown — most transport managers could recite the undertakings from memory. It is that the evidence is generated in a yard at five in the morning, by drivers with a run to start, and then has to survive six months in a filing cabinet in a form an examiner will accept. Almost every operator that comes unstuck was doing the work and could not show it.
What makes haulage compliance hard
The undertakings are the standard, not the vehicles
A Traffic Commissioner does not ask whether your lorries are in good order. They ask whether the promises made when the licence was granted are being kept — vehicles fit and serviceable, defects reported in writing, records kept and produced on request. Each one is an evidence question, and an operator who agrees with all of them but cannot produce the paperwork is in the same position as one who ignored them.
Daily checks that never arrive
The walkaround check happens every day, at every depot, before anyone from the office is awake. On paper it is a pad in the cab, and the sheets come back when they come back. The gap this leaves is not the defect that was missed but the day with no sheet at all — a missing record is indistinguishable, to an examiner, from a check that never happened.
Inspection intervals you set, and have to justify
Inspection intervals are not handed to you. You set them against the age and condition of the vehicle, the work it does, the mileage it covers and the conditions it operates in, and then have to explain that decision. The risk is drift: an interval that quietly stretches over a busy quarter, noticed by nobody until the dates and the schedule no longer agree.
Entitlement that lapses without telling you
A licence can be endorsed, a Driver CPC can expire and a vocational entitlement can lapse without a single thing changing in the yard. The driver still turns up, still has a card in their wallet, and is still put in a vehicle. Nothing surfaces it except a check somebody remembered to do — and recruitment-day checking, never repeated, is the commonest version of this failure.
The day you are asked to produce it all
A maintenance investigation is a documentary exercise. An examiner reads whether the system described on paper is the one actually running, testing consistency: inspections against the schedule, defects against the checks, rectification against the defects. Assembling that from three folders, a spreadsheet and the workshop's own records is where a well-run fleet starts to look like a badly run one.
How FleetOptix helps
The undertakings are the standard
Every record the undertakings call for sits against the vehicle or driver it belongs to, in one system rather than three, and the roll-ups an auditor asks for are exported rather than assembled. The question stops being whether the evidence exists and becomes which period you want it for.
The answer ready before the question is askedDaily checks that never arrive
The check is submitted from the yard on a phone, so it exists the moment it is done rather than when the sheet comes back. A nil return is a record in its own right, which closes the gap paper leaves, and a defect goes straight to the workshop with the vehicle and driver attached.
Checks that arrive, and defects that get closedInspection intervals you set, and have to justify
Inspection dates, defect history and repair records sit against the vehicle they belong to rather than on a wall planner, so the interval you set is visible against the interval you are actually achieving. Drift shows up as a widening gap while there is still time to pull it back.
Every vehicle roadworthy, and the records to prove itEntitlement that lapses without telling you
Licence, CPC and medical expiry sit on one driver record with the flag raised before an entitlement lapses rather than after. The useful output is not the check but the next date, which is what turns licence checking from an event somebody remembers into a system.
Know that every driver is still entitled to driveThe day you are asked to produce it all
Shifts, runs and renewal dates sit on one calendar, so the plan and the compliance diary cannot quietly drift apart — and a vehicle due for inspection is visible before it is promised to a customer rather than after.
Build the week once, and see what it commits you to
Who it is for
Transport managers
The person named on the licence, carrying continuous and effective responsibility for how the fleet is run, with their own repute on the line.
What is transport manager?Owner-operators and small hauliers
A handful of vehicles and no compliance department, where the transport manager is also the person driving, quoting and invoicing. The constraint is time, not willingness: anything that takes an evening a week does not get done.
What is operator licence?Compliance and office managers
The person who actually chases the missing check sheets, books the inspections and files what comes back. The job is largely one of noticing what has not arrived.
Workshop and maintenance staff
Whoever carries out or receives inspections and rectification, in-house or contracted. They need the defect to arrive with the vehicle and its history attached, not relayed through the office.
What is preventative maintenance inspection?Depot managers
Running one site in a business with several, who needs their own fleet's position without being handed a view of everybody else's.
What is operating centre?Questions haulage operators ask
- Does FleetOptix analyse tachograph data?
- No. FleetOptix does not download, analyse or interpret tachograph data, and does not calculate drivers' hours compliance — that is a job for a dedicated tachograph package. What it holds is the record around it: the driver file, the briefing, and the follow-up to an infringement once identified, which is the part an investigation actually reads.
- Does it replace my maintenance provider?
- No. Inspections and repairs are still carried out by your own workshop or contractor. FleetOptix is where the resulting records live, so inspection history, defects raised and work done sit with the vehicle rather than in a provider's system you cannot export from.
- Can drivers complete walkaround checks on a phone?
- Yes. The check is submitted from the yard, including a nil-defect return when nothing is found, so the record exists from that moment rather than when a paper sheet is handed in. A defect reaches the workshop with the vehicle and driver already attached.
- We run several operating centres. Does it handle multiple depots?
- Yes. FleetOptix is built for multi-depot organisations, with role-based access so staff see the vehicles and drivers they work with, and a cross-depot view for those who need the whole picture.
- What would I actually show a DVSA examiner?
- The records themselves: walkaround checks including nil returns, defect reports with the rectification and completion date, inspection history against each vehicle, and licence and CPC records with the dates they were last checked. FleetOptix exports these rather than requiring you to assemble them.
- Is it worth it for a small fleet?
- The licensing obligations do not scale down: an operator with six vehicles gives the same undertakings as one with sixty, and faces the same examiner. What changes is that a small operator has no compliance department absorbing the admin.
PROOF PLACEHOLDER — customer name, fleet size and outcome from a haulage operator goes here once there is one to quote. Nothing invented in the meantime.
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Put the evidence somewhere it can be found
Vehicles, drivers, checks and records in one platform, built for UK haulage operators.
14 days free access · no card needed