Drivers & Fleet: The Catalogs Behind Collections

A collection planned around a van that was sold last spring, or a driver whose license expired in March, is a category of mistake the platform’s catalogs exist to make visible. /settings/core/drivers and /settings/core/fleet are the records collection planning draws from. Neither is a route planner; both are the honest list of who and what can actually be sent.

Drivers and crew

A driver record is really a crew record: name and contact details, a role of driver, loader, team lead or technician, a status, the license types held and when they expire, certifications, a home warehouse, the vehicle currently assigned, running totals, a rating, a timeline and notes. The list can be searched, filtered by role and shown with or without inactive people, and a tenant without any records yet can seed a default set to start from. Deleting a driver marks the record inactive instead of erasing operational history — the collections that person drove still happened.

License categories

License types are not free text. /settings/core/drivers/license-categories holds the categories a driver record can refer to, each with a code, a label, a description, a sort order and an active flag. A one-click seed loads the EU defaults; a category can be edited freely and deleted only while nothing refers to it. Keep the list aligned with the jurisdictions where the team really drives.

Vehicles

A vehicle record carries a status, a type of van, flatbed or car, make and model, year, license plate and VIN, payload capacity in kilograms, pallet capacity, a liftgate flag, a GPS flag, a home warehouse, the assigned driver, kilometres, the collections it has run, and the MOT, insurance and service dates. The fleet list can be searched and filtered by type, and seeded with defaults when empty. If a vehicle exists only as a vague memory and a key on someone’s desk, it is not a fleet record yet.

Decommissioning is not deleting

Taking a vehicle out of service is not a hard delete. The platform keeps its collection history and removes it from the options new work can pick; a vehicle still attached to an active collection must be reassigned or the collection completed first. That order is deliberate. The truck can retire. The evidence that it drove to the client on the fourteenth cannot.

Why both catalogs

A driver chosen on a collection visit is linked by their directory record, so a matching name alone cannot assign the visit to someone else. The driver needs a linked user account to use the mobile route. Fleet records still describe vehicles and capacities; choosing a vehicle type does not yet reserve a specific vehicle or verify scheduling conflicts.

The mobile route and driver card on Dashboard use your timezone preference for both today’s visits and displayed times, falling back to the platform default. Local midnight and daylight-saving changes define the day; the server timezone does not.