Struggling to Organize Your Fleet’s Registration, License Renewals?
Struggling to Organize Your Fleet’s Registration, License Renewals? Use These Tips
As a fleet manager, you are flooded with questions and tasks that need your attention every day. While you may be focused on maintenance and repair issues, it’s important to not overlook important compliance tasks – like renewing vehicle registrations and drivers’ licenses.
These can easily get lost in the shuffle without an organized plan. Use these tips to ensure you are proactively planning for vehicle registrations and driver’s license renewals before your vehicles and drivers are sidelined.
Keep an Organized Database
With multiple vehicles and drivers, it’s hard to keep track of individual vehicle registration and driver’s license renewal dates. Take the guesswork out of this process and keep a detailed database that you can access to check for upcoming deadlines.
This database should include:
- Vehicle license plate information
- Date the vehicle registration expires
- Vehicle weight
- Driver license information
- Driver license expiration date
You can also include any documents needed for renewing the registrations and licenses.
Placing this information in a database will let you search the information to determine which expiration dates are approaching so you can act early.
Be Proactive with Your Renewals
Leaving your licensing and registration renewals to the last minute can not only be stressful – it can also result in drivers and vehicles being sidelined. To avoid this, be proactive.
Determine which licenses and registrations need to be renewed as soon as possible to allow time for gathering the necessary information. Ideally, you should start the process 90 days before the documents expire. This gives you plenty of time to apply for the renewals and get the new documents to drivers. It also allows time to complete weight requirements and routine safety inspections for any heavy–duty trucks in your fleet.
Use Your Fleet Management Software
Another way to organize your renewals is to use your fleet management software solution. The RTA trainers recommend using preventative maintenance tools to monitor when these items are due. The RTA system lets users track up to 260 PMs per vehicle, so you can add license and registration renewals to the PM schedule to alert you and your staff to upcoming due dates.
In addition to tracking license and registration renewals, the RTA trainers also suggest tracking the following through PMs:
- State Emissions/Opacity Testing
- State/Federal Inspections