Adding a vehicle to your fleet

What Fleet tracks and why it starts empty

Fleet is where Verinode keeps your service trucks, vans, trailers, and specialty rigs, along with the maintenance, compliance, insurance, driver, cost, and accident records that hang off each one. None of that can flow in on its own the way an invoice or a job estimate can: there is no document a carrier sends you that lists your vehicles. The fleet has to start with you telling Verinode what you drive. The + Add Vehicle form is that starting point, and every other Fleet tool (maintenance cadence, DOT compliance tracking, insurance renewals, driver records, recurring costs, accident history) needs at least one vehicle on file before it has anything to attach to.

This is manual entry by design for now. A registration-document upload path that reads VIN, year, make, and model straight off a scanned registration card is planned for a later phase; today, you type it in.

Where to find it

Open Fleet from the sidebar at /fleet. The + Add Vehicle button sits in the page header, next to the send-data button, on every view of the section, whether you're looking at the Fleet home or one of the six roster/maintenance/compliance/insurance/drivers/costs tabs opened from a tile.

If your fleet is empty, the Fleet home hero reads "Add a service truck, van, equipment trailer, or hydrovac to start tracking maintenance, DOT compliance, fuel costs, and driver records," and the Recently Added row shows a dashed placeholder: "No vehicles yet. Use "+ Add Vehicle" in the header to capture your first service truck, van, or trailer." The Roster tab of the card slider carries the same message: "No vehicles yet. Use "+ Add Vehicle" in the page header to capture your first service truck, van, or trailer." Clicking + Add Vehicle from any of these entry points opens the same form.

The Add Vehicle form

The form opens as a modal titled Add Vehicle. It captures a name, a type, an ownership category, and a handful of optional identifying and financial details. Two fields are required to save: Name and Type (plus Ownership, which defaults to a value so it's effectively always set). Everything else can be left blank and filled in later from the vehicle's own profile page.

1. 1Click + Add Vehicle in the Fleet page header.
2. 2Type a Name for the vehicle, for example "Service Truck 4" or "Hydrovac 1." This is a free-text label, not a VIN or plate, it's how the vehicle will read throughout Fleet, Roster, and any decision that references it.
3. 3Pick a Type from the dropdown (see the type list below). If you pick Other, a follow-up field appears asking you to describe what kind of vehicle it is, this becomes the label shown everywhere instead of a generic "Other."
4. 4Pick an Ownership category: Owned, Leased, Financed, or Rented.
5. 5Optionally fill in Year, Make, and Model as three side-by-side fields.
6. 6Optionally enter the VIN (up to 17 characters, shown and stored in uppercase).
7. 7Optionally enter the Plate and its issuing State, and the vehicle's Mileage.
8. 8Optionally add Notes, for anything that doesn't fit a structured field (for example, "Box truck reserved for contents pack-outs").
9. 9Click Add Vehicle. The button reads "Saving…" while the write is in flight, then the modal closes and the vehicle is on the roster.

Field-by-field

• Name (required). Free text, no format enforced. This is the display name used across Fleet: the Roster table, the Recently Added tiles on Fleet home, and every dropdown that lets you attach a maintenance record, compliance event, cost, or accident to a specific vehicle.
• Type (required). A fixed list: Service Truck, Cube Van, Pickup, Cargo Van, Equipment Trailer, Hydrovac, Contents Transport, or Other. Picking Other requires you to describe the vehicle in the field that appears below it ("Describe what kind of vehicle") before the form will save; that description becomes the type label shown everywhere instead of the word "Other."
• Ownership (required, defaults to Owned). One of Owned, Leased, Financed, or Rented. This feeds the Fleet home hero's Owned vs. Leased/Financed split and the acquisition-value math described below.
• Year. A four-digit year between 1900 and 2100. Entering something outside that range, or a non-whole number, blocks the save with "Year must be a valid 4-digit year."
• Make and Model. Free text, for example "Ford" and "F-350." Together with Year they form the "Year / Make / Model" column you'll see on the Roster tab.
• VIN. Up to 17 characters, automatically uppercased. VIN is treated as a sensitive vehicle identifier and is encrypted at rest under your operator vault key, the same protection Verinode applies to other identifying business data, because a VIN combined with plate and state can identify a specific vehicle and its owner in DMV and insurance records. It never leaves your own account view.
• Plate and State. Plate is free text (also uppercased), State accepts up to three characters. Like VIN, the plate is encrypted at rest for the same reason. On the Roster table, the plate (and state, in parentheses) shows as a subtitle under the vehicle name whenever it's on file.
• Mileage. A non-negative number. Entering a negative value blocks the save with "Mileage must be a non-negative number." This becomes the vehicle's current odometer reading, shown on the Roster table's Mileage column and on the Recently Added tiles (formatted as, for example, "125,000 mi").
• Notes. Free text, no character limit enforced in the form. Useful for anything operational that doesn't have its own field yet, for example which crew the vehicle is dedicated to.

Fields you won't see on this form, DOT number, GVWR, purchase date, purchase price, garaging facility, and primary driver, aren't part of the initial capture. They're filled in afterward from the vehicle's own profile (opened by clicking its row on the Roster tab), which is also where you set condition and status once the vehicle is in service.

How the new vehicle appears

There's no page reload. Saving the form updates Fleet's underlying data and refreshes what's on screen in place, so the vehicle shows up immediately in every place that reads the fleet list:

• Recently Added, the horizontal tile row on Fleet home, gains a new tile showing the vehicle's type as its label, its name as the headline, Year/Make/Model as the subtext (or a dash if none were entered), and mileage as the meta line if you entered one. This row holds up to the eight most recently added vehicles, newest first.
• The Fleet home hero recalculates: the active-vehicle count, the Owned vs. Leased/Financed pill, and the acquisition-value total all update to include the new vehicle (acquisition value only counts if a purchase price has been recorded on the vehicle, which the create form doesn't capture, so a freshly added vehicle won't move that number until a purchase price is added from its profile).
• The Roster tab, opened from the card slider, gains a new row in the vehicle table, sorted alongside the rest.
• Every vehicle picker elsewhere in Fleet (the dropdowns on the Maintenance, Compliance, Costs, and Accidents Add forms) includes the new vehicle as a selectable option, shown as its name, its type, and its plate if one was entered.

If the save fails, for example a required field is missing or a value doesn't pass validation, the modal stays open and shows the specific error inline instead of closing, so you can fix the one field and resubmit without losing what you've already typed elsewhere in the form.

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