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Fleet overview and setup

Understand what Fleet covers, switch it on with your licence, choose your country preset and add your first asset.

For
OwnerFleet manager
Hosting
Any hosting
Devices
All devices
Business
Fleet

Checked against Pop Street Dispatch 0.1.0

Fleet looks after the vehicles, trailers and equipment you own and run. You will be able to check that Fleet is licensed, choose your country preset, add your first asset and know what to set up next.

Fleet keeps meter readings, maintenance schedules, documents with expiry dates, fuel, tyres, inspections, expenses, driver advances and cost per vehicle in one place. Reminders for maintenance, documents and stale meters arrive from a nightly job. The Fleet screens arrive with the web console. Until then you work through the API calls named in each article.

Before you start #

  • You need the owner or fleet-manager role. Changing the locale needs the owner role.
  • Fleet runs under the dispatch_fleet licence flag. It is included in the Business plan, available as an add-on for Starter and Pro, and included in the 14-day trial.
  • Reading and exporting Fleet records always works. Writing to any /fleet path needs the flag.

Steps #

  1. Call GET /fleet/status. The answer names the feature (dispatch_fleet), says whether it is licensed, and shows writes as true when you can add and change records.
  2. Choose your country preset with PATCH /settings/locale and a body such as {"preset": "IN"}. The preset applies when no locale has been saved yet. It sets currency, distance and volume units, date and time formats, digit grouping, time zone and the first day of the week. You can then adjust any single field. See units-and-currency.
  3. Check the result with GET /settings/locale. The answer shows saved: true once your choice is stored.
  4. Add the document types for your country. Saving the locale adds them for you, and POST /fleet/doc-types/seed adds them again for another country. See documents-and-expiry.
  5. Add your first asset with POST /fleet/assets. Send unit_no (required for operator assets), and optionally kind (vehicle, trailer or equipment), label, make, model, year, vin, registration_no and odometer. The answer is the new asset. Dispatch records the odometer as its first meter reading.
  6. Open GET /fleet/assets/:id to see the asset with its meters, maintenance board and documents.

What to do next #

  • Enter meter readings regularly: assets-and-meters.
  • Add maintenance schedules: how-due-is-worked-out.
  • Set up reminders: reminders-email-and-whatsapp.
  • Record registration and insurance documents: documents-and-expiry.
  • Add your drivers: driver-profiles.
Technical details
  • The licence gate runs in guard before any write to a /fleet path. Without the flag the answer is feature_not_licensed (403). In read-only licence mode the answer is licence_read_only (403). Reads and exports continue in both cases.
  • Assets have an ownership of operator, inventory or third_party. Customer vehicles come in through the customer record.
  • A unit_no is unique among operator assets.
  • The asset keeps the distance unit it was created with (odometer_unit). A new asset takes the tenant's distance unit unless you send odometer_unit as km or mi.
  • Purchase details (purchase_cents, purchase_currency, purchased_on, residual_cents, useful_life_months) feed cost per vehicle.

If something goes wrong #

  • feature_not_licensed (403): the licence has no dispatch_fleet flag. Ask the owner about adding Fleet. Your records stay readable and exportable.
  • licence_read_only (403): the licence is in read-only mode. See licence-states.
  • validation_failed (422) with fields: ["unit_no"]: operator assets need a unit number.
  • validation_failed (422) with fields: ["kind"]: use vehicle, trailer or equipment.
  • conflict (409): an operator asset with that unit number exists. Pick another number.
  • invalid_date (422): write dates as YYYY-MM-DD.