How to track vehicle document expiry: insurance, inspection, registration

To track vehicle document expiry, keep one record per vehicle with each document’s validity dates, taken from the document itself: the end of the insurance cover, the date the next technical inspection is due, the validity of the registration. Then check every day which of those dates fall inside a warning window, and which vehicles have no valid document at all. A renewed document should clear the warning by itself, so the list only shows what still needs action.

Which documents to track

• Insurance certificate. Start and end of cover, insurer and policy number.
• Technical inspection report. The date the next inspection is due, and the result.
• Registration certificate. It should be on file for every vehicle; record an end date if it has one.
• Anything else with an end date, such as a leasing contract or a permit.

Why the spreadsheet fails

A spreadsheet of expiry dates works until somebody forgets to update it. Dates are typed by hand from a PDF, a renewal arrives in someone’s inbox and never reaches the sheet, and a new truck joins the fleet without a row. The sheet also never tells you anything: someone has to open it and look. What lapses is rarely the document nobody knew about. It is the one that was renewed late, or recorded against the wrong vehicle.

A routine that holds

1. Read the dates from the document, not from memory or an e-mail.
2. Link each document to the vehicle by VIN or plate, and check the match before it counts.
3. Warn ahead, with a lead time per document type. Count a missing document as a problem too.
4. Ask for the renewal early. Request it from the insurer, broker, leasing company or garage before the old one runs out.
5. Send one summary a day, not a message per document, and only for what is new.
6. Leave out assets that have no such papers, such as containers, so the list stays credible.

How Konvoi does it

Documents reach Konvoi by upload or by forwarding them to the workspace’s own e-mail address. Konvoi recognises registrations, insurance certificates and technical inspection reports, reads their validity dates, the insurer and policy number, the next inspection date and the result, and links each one to a vehicle by VIN, plate or plate history. A document Konvoi could not link with confidence waits in the review inbox and does not count until a person confirms it.

Fleet Health then flags, per vehicle, missing, expired and expiring insurance, missing, overdue and due-soon technical inspections, and missing or expired registrations. The default warning is 30 days ahead, and a renewal that starts by the day after the old cover ends clears the warning. Each rule can be switched off, given its own lead time and limited to certain vehicle types. Admins, or the members and outside addresses you pick, get at most one fleet-health e-mail a day, and each issue is announced once. To chase a renewal, a document request e-mails the insurer, leasing company or garage for a set of vehicles; replies come back to the workspace inbox and each matching document ticks its vehicle off. More on the documents and compliance page.