Vehicles

Every vehicle that comes through your workshop gets its own company-scoped record in Pistonlog. Once created, the record stays — its full service history is always available, no matter how many times it comes back or how many different customers bring it in over the years.

What a vehicle record stores

There's no VIN column on the vehicle record today — registration is the unique handle.

Vehicles are company-scoped (visible across all your garages), same as customers.

Creating a vehicle

From a jobcard

The most common route. When you create or edit a jobcard, type a registration into the Vehicle field. If no match is found, the DVSA lookup offers to pre-fill make / model / colour / fuel / MOT date. Confirm and the vehicle is created and linked to that jobcard.

From the import flow

Bulk-loading from another system goes through the combined customer + vehicle CSV importer — see CSV import.

Vehicles and customers

A vehicle is not directly attached to a customer — there's no customerId column. The link is through shared jobcards: vehicle ↔ jobcard ↔ customer. This is deliberate, because real-world ownership changes. When a car is sold, the new owner picks it up on their next jobcard, the old owner stays attached to past jobcards.

Finding an existing vehicle

The Vehicles page lists every vehicle in your company. Use the search bar at the top to find by registration, make, or model.

When adding a vehicle to a jobcard, the same search works inline — start typing in the Vehicle field and matching records appear.

Editing vehicle details

Open the vehicle record and update any field. Click Save.

Service history

Open any vehicle record to see every jobcard ever linked to it, in reverse chronological order — across every customer the vehicle has had and every garage in your company. See Vehicle job history.

Mileage

The mileage on the vehicle record is the last value you set on it manually — Pistonlog doesn't automatically copy mileage from jobcard mileageIn / mileageOut into the vehicle record. Update it on the vehicle when you want the vehicle-level reading to reflect the current odometer.

Past mileages on jobcards build a service-history view of how the vehicle has accumulated miles over time.