Three vehicles fit in a spreadsheet. Fleet maintenance records feel like overkill: you know their mileages by heart, you see the invoices come in, and the next inspection comes back to mind at roughly the right moment.
At five, something shifts. The problem is not the number of rows, it is the number of hands. The colleague who takes the van on Saturday writes nothing down, the garage invoice lands in a different inbox, and the "next service" column becomes an estimate nobody dares to check. Here is what a fleet service history actually has to hold, how to set one up without blocking a week, and how the WheelTrust Business plan keeps it going with several people involved.
The short version
A fleet service history is not a cost sheet. Vehicle by vehicle, it answers one question: what was done, when, by whom, and on what evidence.
A spreadsheet does not fail on the day it gets too big. It fails on the day two people fill it in differently.
Three roles are enough to organise a fleet: the person who steers, the person who runs it day to day, the person who drives and logs.
The service history must belong to the company, not to the personal account of whoever created it. That is what makes the difference when someone leaves.
When a company vehicle is sold on, a complete history, invoice by invoice, holds its price. An incomplete folder sells at a discount.
What is a fleet service history?
It is the servicing of every vehicle, kept in one place, under the same rules.
The most common confusion is to call "service history" what is really a cost tracker. Both are useful and they answer different questions. A cost tracker tells you what the fleet cost you last quarter. A service history tells you that the cambelt on the van was changed at 118,000 km, on 12 March, at a named garage, and that the invoice is attached to that entry.
You need the second one the moment a third party asks you to account for something: a buyer at resale, a leasing company at the end of a contract, an insurer after a claim, a client whose deliveries you handle. The first can always be rebuilt from the accounts. The second cannot: lost information does not come back.
Why the spreadsheet ends up costing more than it saves
It never tells you what it does not know.
A spreadsheet shows what has been typed into it, with the same confidence whether the row is from yesterday or from two years ago. Nothing separates a blank cell that means "nothing was done" from a blank cell that means "nobody entered it". That is the central flaw, and it gets worse with every extra contributor.
Then come the ordinary problems every fleet manager knows. Invoices live somewhere other than the sheet, in an inbox or a folder. Two colleagues open the file on the same morning and one of them overwrites the other. The person who built the reminder formulas moves to another job. And the day you genuinely need evidence, you have to dig through a mailbox to find a PDF from 2024.
The honest calculation is not "the spreadsheet is free". It is the time spent rebuilding, multiplied by how often you do it, plus the value you lose at resale for want of being able to show the servicing.
The four things a fleet service history must hold for every vehicle
Per vehicle, not per invoice.
Identity and the dates that keep coming back. Number plate, date of first registration, acquisition date, mileage when it joined the fleet. These are the markers that make everything else readable.
The service entries, in order. Every visit to the workshop, with the date, the mileage read that day, the provider and what was actually done. A service entry without a mileage is worth half: the mileage is what tells you whether the next one is due.
The supporting documents, attached. The invoice belongs on the entry it proves, not in a parallel folder. It is the only way to produce evidence in ten seconds three years later.
The upcoming actions. Roadworthiness test, manufacturer service, end of warranty, insurance renewal. They are calculated from the first two layers, provided those are kept.
Everything else, expense tracking included, follows from these four layers. The reverse is not true.
Who enters what: three roles, one source of truth
In the WheelTrust Business plan, the fleet is organised around three roles. It is the split that holds, whether you have eight vehicles or eighty.
The Fleet Manager sees the whole fleet, invites the others, creates the fleets and decides who comes in and who leaves. They, and only they, manage the subscription. Often the owner, or whoever signs the invoices.
The Fleet Administrator works day to day on the fleets assigned to them: they log service entries, file documents, watch due dates, invite drivers and assign vehicles to them. They see neither the subscription nor its billing. In a ten-vehicle company this is frequently the same person as the manager, and that is fine.
The Driver accesses the vehicles assigned to them, expense tracking included, and logs what happened there, with the invoice to back it up. The rest of the fleet does not open to them.
Every entry keeps the name of its author and its date. To see what each role sees, open the Business demo: a fictional twelve-vehicle company, with no account, where nothing is saved.
This split is not bureaucracy. It avoids two expensive situations: the person with every right who unknowingly edits the history of a vehicle they never drive, and the blocked driver who ends up sending a photo of an invoice by message, where it will be lost.
One point to settle before you invite your employees: in France, the law asks you to inform them, and to consult the works council (CSE) if you have one. These obligations fit on one page, with a template notice to hand them: your obligations as an employer.
What happens when someone leaves, or when a vehicle is sold on
That is the moment of truth for a fleet service history.
If the service histories were created from an employee's personal account, their departure takes the fleet's past with it. You may get an export; you will almost certainly not get the attachments or the entry dates. That is why they have to belong to the company from day one, with people as members who join and leave. In the WheelTrust Business plan, that is the rule: when someone leaves, their access stops and their entries stay.
At resale, the question changes: what can you show the buyer? A van sold with its full history is not negotiated the same way as a van sold on someone's word. In the WheelTrust Business plan, the service history is not transferred to the buyer: it stays in the company, with its entries and its supporting documents. On the day of the sale, you find each invoice in seconds, attached to its entry, to show the buyer. And the Fleet Manager can request a full copy of the company's data at any time: the service histories, their entries and the uploaded documents, an archive to keep within the company.
Setting up a fleet service history, step by step
Allow half a day for ten vehicles, working from what you already have.
Write to us from the Business plan page with the number of vehicles to track. The company space is not created self-service: we check with you who is responsible for it, then you invite the people concerned with their role. Start tight: the manager, plus one or two people who do the data entry.
Upload your whole fleet in one go: a file with the plate, the make and the model is enough, and each vehicle gets its own page. Add the date of first registration and today's mileage to the file if you have them. Do not wait until you have the full past to open the page.
Go back through the last twelve months of invoices, no further to begin with. For each one, copy over the date, the mileage, the provider and the nature of the work, then attach the invoice to the entry it proves.
Note down the due dates you know, starting with the roadworthiness test, vehicle by vehicle, so you have them to hand: they are what tells you which catching-up comes first.
Give one written rule for data entry, in a single sentence: who enters, within what timeframe, and with which attachment. Without that sentence you will have rebuilt a spreadsheet with more screens.
Add older servicing as it surfaces, when an invoice turns up. A partial but dated history beats a perfect one that keeps being postponed.
Vehicles that stay outside the fleet, a personal car for instance, are kept in a separate service history on the same account. They do not mix.
The figures, with their source
3 roles in the WheelTrust Business plan: Fleet Manager, Fleet Administrator, Driver. Business plan page, consulted on 18/10/2026.
20 vehicles: the first tier of the WheelTrust Business plan, billed per tracked vehicle, once a year. Price grid and calculator on the Business plan page, plans for individuals on the pricing page.
The obligations attached to your own company vehicles, roadworthiness testing included, are set by your national vehicle authority: the DVLA and the DVSA in the United Kingdom, their equivalent wherever you are reading this. Deadlines and fees change, so check them there rather than on a blog.
Frequently asked questions
How many vehicles before a fleet service history is worth it?
In practice, from the moment several people work on the same vehicles, which very often means five. The threshold is not the number of vehicles but the number of hands. A company with three vans driven by six people needs one more than a sole trader who owns eight. On the plan side, the WheelTrust Business plan starts at a tier of 20 vehicles. A fleet of eight or twelve vehicles fits in it: you pay for that tier, and the spare room is there when the fleet grows. If you are the only one keeping the records of your work vehicles, a dozen at most, the Premium plan is often enough. The details are on the pricing page.
Can we start without committing the whole company?
Yes. The quickest way is to open the Business demo and switch from one role to another, with no account. You can also open a free account, create one vehicle and enter three services to see how it feels: creating an account asks for no bank card. Once the way of working suits you, write to us from the Business plan page and we open your company's space. The Business plan has no trial period: the demo takes its place.
Do drivers see the amounts?
Those of their own vehicle, yes. A driver looks at the vehicle they have been given, expense tracking included, and logs what happened there. What they do not see is the rest of the fleet and the fleet-wide view, which stay with the two management roles. It is a role setting, not an option to buy.
What happens to the service history when we sell a company vehicle?
In the Business plan, it is not transferred to the buyer: it remains the company's, with its whole history. You show the buyer the invoices attached to the entries. Transferring a service history exists on a personal account, not on a company one.
Do we have to re-enter ten years of servicing for this to be useful?
No, and that is the surest way never to start. Twelve months of invoices are enough for the service history to be useful in the first week. The rest fills in when an invoice comes out of a drawer.
In short
A fleet service history rests on four layers: the identity of the vehicle, its dated entries with mileages, the supporting documents attached to them, the due dates that follow. What decides its value is not the tool, it is knowing who enters what and who owns the history.
A service history living in an employee's personal account stops at their notice period. One owned by the company survives departures, inspections and resales. That is what the WheelTrust Business plan does: the service histories belong to the company, everyone logs entries according to their role, and the history stays when people leave. See each role in the demo before you take it to your team.
The WheelTrust team