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, click New + to open the New Vehicle dialog, where the DVSA lookup pre-fills make / model / year / colour / fuel / engine size / MOT date. Click Create Vehicle and the vehicle is created and linked to that jobcard.

From the Vehicles page

Click Add Vehicle at the top of the Vehicles page: the same form, with the same DVSA lookup.

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.

The vehicle record's tabs

Open a vehicle and you get five tabs:

Finding an existing vehicle

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

When adding a vehicle to a jobcard, an inline search does the same job — start typing in the Vehicle field and records matching the registration or make / model appear.

Editing vehicle details

Open the vehicle record's Vehicle Info tab and update any field. Click Save Changes.

Service history

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

Staff reminders

Staff reminders are internal notes attached to a vehicle so the next person to book it in can't miss them: "locking wheel nut is in the boot", "owner disputes the last invoice, check with the office first".

You add one from a jobcard: open the jobcard's three-dot menu and choose Add next visit reminder, then type the note. It attaches to the jobcard's vehicle, not the jobcard.

The next time that vehicle is picked in New Jobcard, the reminders pop up under the vehicle field, badged staff only, showing who added each one and on which jobcard. Each has a Mark as dealt with button, and the jobcard can't be created until every reminder has been reviewed. If the check itself fails, the jobcard is held back until it succeeds; retry from the banner.

Reminders are managed on the vehicle's Reminders tab, under Staff reminders, where you can see and clear the outstanding ones.

Mileage

The mileage on the vehicle record tracks the most recent reading: recording Mileage In on a jobcard automatically updates the vehicle's mileage as well (Mileage Out doesn't). You can also edit it directly on the vehicle record at any time.

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