Yard check

The walk round the vehicle takes four minutes and almost nobody writes it down. A driver notices a soft tyre or a dead indicator, mentions it to whoever is nearest, and by lunchtime it has gone out of everyone's head. Three weeks later a different driver finds the same thing and assumes it is already known about. Yard Check exists for that gap: it is the record of what one person saw this morning, standing next to the vehicle. Every vehicle is drawn as its number plate. A ring on the plate closes as today's walk is worked through, so the yard is read at a glance - who has been walked round, who has been started and abandoned, and who has not been touched. A plate with an amber corner has something open on it. A plate struck through has something on it that stops it. Across the top are the only two numbers that matter first thing in the morning: how many vehicles have not been walked round yet, and how many are standing with a stop item. The check itself is not a form. The vehicle is drawn from above with its stations placed around it in the order your feet actually take them - front, nearside, rear, offside, under the bonnet, then the cab - and the ring closes behind you as each one is finished. Half a walkaround looks like half a circle, which is the point: a partly done check can never be mistaken for a completed one, and the app will not let you finish a walk with items still unrecorded. What makes it worth keeping is what happens to a fault. Reporting one raises it against the vehicle, not against this morning's sheet. It appears already marked on the next driver's walkaround, with what was found and how many times it has now been reported, so nobody starts from a clean page on a vehicle that has a known problem. Reporting the same thing again tomorrow does not create a second entry - it adds to the first, so a mirror reported on eight mornings shows as one fault, eight days old, which is a far more useful thing to look at than eight separate notes. Items you mark as stopping the vehicle take it off the road on the yard screen until they are dealt with. Closing a fault is deliberate. Ticking the item as fine on a later walk does not clear it; somebody has to record what was actually done, and that stays in the vehicle's history beside the fault it answered. The review screen adds up the fortnight: walks finished each day, which vehicles were missed, what gets reported most, what gets quietly marked as not applicable, and which fault has been standing open the longest. All of it is worked out from the walks themselves - nothing there is typed in by anyone. Yard Check records what a driver reported and nothing more. It does not say a vehicle is roadworthy, legal or safe, it names no test, standard or authority, and it holds no money - no repair costs, no parts, no charges. It keeps registrations you type in and drivers' first names, and nothing else about anybody. Everything stays on the device, there is no sign-in, and it works in a yard with no signal exactly as it works in the office.