Nobody in the motor trade has a problem running vehicle checks. The check takes thirty seconds and everybody knows why it matters.
The problem is the next bit. The report opens in a browser tab, the PDF lands in Downloads, and that is the last anyone thinks about it. Three weeks later a customer asks a direct question about a car's history and the answer is a search through somebody's laptop, a login nobody remembers, and eventually a second check on a car that was already checked.
You paid twice for the same information. Worse, for a few minutes you could not answer a reasonable question about a car you sold.
This is not a discipline problem. It is a design problem, and it is worth understanding before you try to fix it with a rule.
Why reports go missing
The check happens outside the system of record. Your stock lives in one place. The check happens in another, against a plate typed in by hand. Nothing connects the two except a person remembering to make the connection, and people are busy on the days when checks matter most.
The output is a file, and files have no home. A PDF is a dead end by default. It has a filename chosen by somebody else, it sits in a folder sorted by date, and it carries no relationship to the car it describes. vehicle_report(4).pdf is technically a record. Practically it is a needle.
The person who runs the check is not the person who gets asked. The buyer checks the car at auction on a Tuesday. The customer question arrives five weeks later, on a Saturday, to a salesperson who was not there. Unless the report is somewhere the salesperson naturally looks, it may as well not exist.
Tidying up destroys it. Cars get deleted from stock lists when they sell, or when somebody clears out old records. If the check lived with the car in a fragile way, or lived nowhere at all, that is when it goes.
Provider portals have their own gravity. Logging into a separate system, finding the right check among hundreds, downloading it again: each step is small, and together they are enough that people guess instead.
What it actually costs
Duplicate checks. The most visible cost and the least important. A re-run check costs a few pounds. Annoying, not serious.
Slow answers to buyer questions. More serious. A buyer asking about a car's history at the point of sale is a buyer looking for a reason to trust you. "Let me look into that and call you back" is a worse answer than the report, even when the report says exactly what they were hoping to hear.
Weak ground in a dispute. The most serious. Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 a car must be as described, of satisfactory quality and fit for purpose, with a short-term right to reject in the first thirty days, and the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 cover misleading descriptions and omissions. In a complaint, "we always run checks" is a policy. The report is evidence. The difference between the two shows up exactly when it is expensive.
Staff who quietly stop bothering. If reports are never findable afterwards, running them starts to feel like paperwork for its own sake, and the check gets skipped on the cheap cars first. That is where the trouble tends to be.
What "filed" should actually mean
If you are fixing this, the test is not "did we save it". It is whether all five of these are true:
Attached to the car, not stored near it. The report should be on the vehicle record, not in a shared drive organised by month. The person looking for it should find it by opening the car, because opening the car is what they were doing anyway.
Findable by anyone, not just the runner. Whoever is standing in front of the customer needs the report, and they should not need the buyer's login or the buyer's laptop.
Right first time. A report filed against the wrong car is worse than no report. Starting the check from the vehicle record rather than typing a registration removes most of that risk, and where two records share a registration, the software should ask rather than guess.
Downloadable on demand. On screen is good for reading. A PDF is what you send to a customer, a finance house or a complaints handler.
Durable past the sale. The report has to survive the car leaving your stock, because that is when the questions start. It should also survive you changing check provider. You paid for that information.
How Vehiso handles it
We built the MotorCheck integration around this problem rather than around the checking, because the checking was never the hard part.
You connect your own MotorCheck trade account once, then run a history, specification or condition alert check from the Tools screen or straight from a car in your stock. What happens next is the point:
The report is stored and readable on screen. Not just a file you are handed. The sections are kept and laid out to be read, in Vehiso, by whoever opens the car.
It files itself against the car when the registration matches one vehicle in your stock. It appears on that car's Vehicle Checks tab, beside the photos, the pricing and the paperwork. If two of your records share a registration, Vehiso asks which one and files it with one click.
Everything downloads as a PDF. Where MotorCheck provide their own document, that is what you get. Where they do not, Vehiso renders the stored report as a PDF on our letterhead, so there is always something to send.
There is a trail of what was run. Which check, on what, by whom, when. Useful when the question is about process rather than about a particular car.
The reports outlive the car. Delete the vehicle and the checks you paid for stay downloadable. Disconnect MotorCheck and they stay too.
Checks are billed by MotorCheck to your own trade account at your own rates. Vehiso does not resell checks and charges nothing per check, and the integration comes with every paid plan.
If you are not using Vehiso
The principle travels, even if the software does not. Pick one place that is already the system of record for your stock, and make it the only place check reports live. Attach the report to the car rather than to a date. Make sure more than one person can retrieve it. Keep it after the car sells.
The mechanism matters less than the rule: a check that is not attached to a car is a check you have paid for and will not be able to use.
Where to go next
- Vehicle history checks for car dealers, the fuller guide to running checks
- How to connect your MotorCheck trade account to Vehiso
- Vehicle preparation tracking: how to use tasks in your dealer management system
- Electronic signatures for car dealers, on keeping the rest of the paperwork attached to the deal
If your checks and your stock currently live in two different tabs, the Vehiso dealer management system puts them in one, on every plan including the free one.
