A driver mentions at the gate that the brakes on ABC-123 are making noise. Someone calls a workshop. The car comes back three days later, the invoice goes to accounts, and a week after that someone types the cost into a spreadsheet — or doesn’t.
Ask afterwards how much that car cost in repairs this year, or how many days it was off the road, and the answer depends on who kept the best notes.
Prosas now runs every vehicle repair as a work order: the same request, approval, assignment and closing your maintenance team already uses for machines, with fields made for cars. One repair, one record, from the first report to the last cost.
Why Vehicle Repairs Get Lost
- Written after the fact — the repair is logged once the car is back, if at all, so nobody sees what is waiting
- Two copies of one repair — the job lives in one place and its cost in another, and the same bill gets counted twice
- The car’s status is guessed — a car in the workshop still shows as available, and someone books it for a trip
- Repairs done outside the system — a quick fix paid in cash never makes it into the numbers
From the Driver’s Report to a Work Order
A Request Made for Cars
When someone sends a work request to the Fleet department and chooses Fix a vehicle, the form changes. Instead of building, floor and room, it asks for what matters on a car:
- The vehicle
- The odometer reading, if known
- The problem: engine, brakes, tires, oil service, battery, electrical, AC, body or accident, inspection or license, or other
- Whether the car can still be driven
- Photos, a description and a priority
Approved and Assigned
Once approved, the request becomes a repair work order with nothing typed twice. The order goes to an in-house mechanic or an outside workshop. Spare parts can come out of inventory or be added as free lines, and labor is recorded the same way as on any other work order.
Fleet managers can also create a repair order directly, without a request.
The Car’s Status Follows the Repair
When the repair starts, the car is marked as in maintenance on its own, and Prosas remembers what its status was before. When the repair is completed or cancelled, the car goes back to that status.
Two safety rules keep this honest:
- If the car has another repair still in progress, it stays in maintenance.
- If someone changed the car’s status by hand in the meantime — for example to sold or out of service — Prosas leaves it alone.
A car that cannot be driven cannot be booked either: while it has an open repair marked “cannot be driven”, trip booking refuses it and names the repair order in the way.
Downtime, Not Just Repair Time
A repair order can record when the car broke down and when it was back on the road. A car can wait four days for a part while the work itself takes three hours. Both numbers are kept, so the time a vehicle was really unavailable is never hidden behind a short repair.
Repairs Done Outside the System
Not every repair starts with a request. A driver gets a flat tire on the highway and pays a roadside shop; a workshop sends an invoice for last week’s service.
A manager can record a finished repair in one step: the vehicle, the day it was fixed, the problem, what was done, the workshop, the odometer, the labor cost, the spare parts and the invoice number. Prosas saves it as a closed repair order, already costed. It does not change the car’s status or send notifications, because the repair has already happened.
The day cannot be in the future, and only managers can record one, because the order is created closed, with no approval step.
One Source for Every Fleet Report
Before, a closed repair also wrote a row into a separate maintenance log, and people could add or edit rows there by hand. That meant two copies of the same repair — and the risk of counting its cost twice.
That log is now retired. The closed repair order is the only place a repair lives, and every fleet report reads it directly:
| Report | What it reads from repair orders |
|---|---|
| Maintenance cost | Labor and parts, per vehicle and per day |
| Cost of ownership | Repair costs, added to the vehicle’s other costs |
| Availability | Maintenance visits and the most-serviced vehicles |
| Vehicle page | Every closed repair, newest first, with a link to its work order |
Old log entries were moved into closed repair orders, so your history is still there.
It works the other way too: car repairs never show up in your machine and building reports. MTBF, the maintenance backlog and technician SLA count maintenance work only, so a busy month in the garage does not make your chillers look unreliable.
How to Start
- Check that every vehicle is in Prosas, with its usual driver.
- Ask drivers to report problems as a work request to the Fleet department, not by phone.
- Add your regular workshops as vendors.
- Record last month’s outside repairs as finished repairs, so the reports start complete.
- Review the cost per vehicle at the end of the first month.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can a company with only the Fleet module use repair orders?
Yes. Work requests and work orders are now shared, so a company with Fleet and no Maintenance module can create repair and trip orders. It sees fleet work only.
Can a repair be preventive, like an oil change?
Yes. A repair keeps the usual work order type, so an oil change can be preventive and broken brakes corrective.
What happens to the repairs we already logged?
They were moved into closed repair orders, with their costs, workshop and notes. Nothing was deleted.
Who can record a finished repair?
Managers only, because it creates an order that is already closed and costed.
Every Repair, Counted Once
With Prosas, a vehicle repair starts as a request, moves through approval and the workshop, keeps the car’s status up to date, and closes with its real cost — in one record that every fleet report reads. No second log, no double counting, and no car booked for a trip while it is still on the lift.
