There is a folder in most haulage offices called Fuel. Inside it is a year of receipts in no order, a few of them photographed on a phone, half of them with the vehicle written on the back in biro.
That folder is what the accountant gets in April. Nobody knows what vehicle number four actually cost to run last year, so nobody knows whether it should be sold.
The paperwork can go in as it arrives instead. Fuel card statements, parts invoices, tyre bills and subcontractor invoices all come by email already. The system reads each one, pulls the amount, the date, the supplier and the registration or job number, and posts it to Xero or QuickBooks with a tracking category per vehicle. Where the invoice has no reg on it, the job number ties it to the van that did the job. Where it has neither, it lands in a holding list of five or six a month for somebody to look at.
Dates are the second half. Each vehicle has a row: MOT, tax, insurance renewal, tacho calibration, six-weekly inspection, O licence. DVLA gives the MOT and tax dates. The rest come off the documents that already came in, because the insurance certificate has the renewal date printed on it and the inspection sheet has the next-due date at the bottom. The system reads them when they arrive and updates the row.
Reminders come out of that row. Four weeks before, two weeks before, and on the Monday of the week. To the transport manager and to whoever books the workshop, in the inbox they already use. The reminder has the vehicle, the date and the last document attached, so nobody has to go and find it.
Cost per vehicle per month is then a number instead of a guess. Fuel, maintenance, tyres and insurance against the revenue from the jobs that van did. Vehicle number four might turn out to cost twice what number six does on the same mileage, and now you would know.
This is the kind of thing we build. It runs in your own Xero or QuickBooks and your own inbox. The accountant still gets a folder in April. It is a report with every line already coded.