The walkaround pad gets filled in on Friday.
Five days of checks, same pen, all ticked.
OkPilot is a vehicle inspection app for fleets that run their own vehicles: each pre-trip inspection is timestamped and located where it actually happened, every reported defect becomes a job with an owner and a due date, and the whole record stays searchable by vehicle months later. Built for operators who get asked to produce the sheet long after the trip.
A defect report nobody owns is paper with your signature on it.
The pad is the obvious problem. A week of walkarounds completed at a desk on Friday afternoon reads as a week of walkarounds that did not happen, and the pattern gives it away: identical handwriting, identical ticks, no defect found in four months across eleven vehicles. Anyone who has looked at these for a living spots it in about ten seconds.
The expensive failure is further down. A driver writes "nearside indicator intermittent" on a sheet. The sheet goes in a tray, the tray goes in a folder, the folder goes in a cabinet. The vehicle runs three more weeks. When the bulb fails at a roadside stop, that sheet still exists, and now it proves you were told.
Digitising the checklist does not make the walkaround more thorough. A driver who was not looking before will not look harder because the tick is on a screen. What changes is whether a defect that was reported goes anywhere, and whether you can show months later that it did.
What happens when you type "Which defects never got fixed?"
“Which defects reported last month never got a work order?”
Nineteen defects were reported in September. Seventeen have a work order attached and fifteen of those are closed. Two have nothing: a cracked mirror housing on van 14, reported 4 September, and a slow air leak on trailer T7, reported 22 September and reported again on 29 September by a different driver. T7 is booked for its annual inspection on 20 October. Want both raised against the workshop now?
It tells you what the paperwork would have hidden
Van 14 has had the same defect reported four times since June and closed each time as no fault found. Either it is intermittent or it is not being looked at. Worth pulling it in?
Driver Mason completed nine checks last week averaging 41 seconds each, against a fleet average of just over four minutes. Not a rule breach, but the shortest on the depot by a long way. Raise it with the supervisor?
Trailer T7 is due its annual inspection in twelve days and has two open defects, one of them on the brake system. If it goes in as-is you will pay for the test twice. Schedule the workshop first?
The driver walks the vehicle, the app watches the clock
The check is built for the vehicle in front of the driver, not one generic form for a van, a tractor unit and a trailer. It records how the check was done as well as what it found.
- Items specific to the unit: a tractor, a trailer and a panel van get different lists, and a trailer check attaches to the trailer rather than to whoever happened to be pulling it.
- Time and place come from the device, per section, not from a box the driver types. A check completed at the depot gate at 06:12 and a check completed at home the night before look different in the record.
- A defect needs a photograph before the check can be submitted, and that photograph is what the workshop sees when the job lands.
- Works with no signal, because depot yards and loading bays rarely have any, and syncs when the phone finds a network again.
Tell it what you run
“We run 24 vans and six tractor units with eleven trailers. Every driver does a pre-trip check before first move and a walkaround at end of shift. Any defect goes to our own workshop, and nothing goes out with a safety defect open. I need to be able to find any check by vehicle and date.”
That is the setup. OkPilot creates:
- Separate check templates for vans, tractors and trailers, with trailers tracked as their own units
- A pre-trip check the driver must submit before the first job of the shift appears
- A defect that opens a workshop job with a named owner and a due date, not a note
- A safety-defect category that marks the vehicle unavailable for dispatch until the job is closed
Since 2018
In market
2,000,000+ tasks
Handled
48 hours
To full setup
Vehicle inspection questions
Is an app-based inspection record acceptable instead of paper?
Electronic inspection records are generally accepted where paper was, provided you can produce a specific one on request, it shows the vehicle, the person, the date and time, what was found and what was done about it, and it has not been altered after the fact. Retention periods and required items differ by country and by vehicle class, so check the rule that applies to your fleet rather than taking our word for it. OkPilot records all of that and keeps an edit history; it does not decide what your regulator requires.
What stops a driver ticking everything through in thirty seconds?
Nothing stops them, and any vendor who tells you otherwise is selling you something. What you get is the evidence: time spent per section, the location the check was submitted from, and a flag when someone is consistently far below the depot average. You still have to have the conversation.
How do I prove a reported defect actually led to a repair?
The defect and the repair are the same record. A defect raised on a check creates a job with an owner and a due date, and closing that job needs a note and, if you require it, a photograph. Pull up the vehicle three years later and the check, the defect, the job, who closed it and when are all on one timeline.
Can a vehicle be blocked from going out with an open defect?
Yes, for the defect categories you choose. Mark a category as safety-critical and a vehicle with one open sits out of the dispatch pool until the job is closed. Lesser items stay open without grounding the vehicle, and you will see them age.
OkPilot also handles property inspection, insurance claims, pest control. See all inspection features.
See it on your own fleet
Book a demo. Bring last month's walkaround sheets and we will show you which defects on them never became a job, and how long the two oldest have been open.