Every fleet reaches the same moment: a vehicle comes back from the workshop, somebody has the invoice, and nobody can say when the last service was, what was replaced, or whether the warranty claim is still open. The tracking platform knew the odometer the whole time. It just was not asked to remember the rest.
Wialon handles the first half of this well. The second half is where fleets improvise, and improvisation is a spreadsheet that leaves with the person who made it.
What Wialon gives you
Service intervals live on the unit, and they can be measured three ways:
- By mileage — every 15,000 km.
- By engine hours — every 500 hours, which is the honest measure for machinery that idles.
- By days — an annual inspection, a leasing check.
For each one, Wialon shows how much is left before the service is due and highlights an overdue one in red. You can set it against the current odometer or engine-hour reading, so the interval follows the vehicle’s real use rather than a calendar guess.
On top of that there are notifications: a Maintenance-type notification fires when a service term is approaching, and you choose the margin — so many kilometres, hours or days in advance — and where it goes, from email to Telegram to a pop-up in the interface. That is a genuinely good scheduling system, and for a fleet of ten vehicles it may be all you ever need.
Where fleets outgrow it
The gap is not scheduling. It is the record of what happened.
A service interval knows that an oil change is due in 2,000 km. It does not hold the invoice from the last one, the parts list, the labour hours, the workshop’s name, or the photo of the part that failed. Those end up in three places at once: a spreadsheet, somebody’s email, and a folder of scans on a laptop. Then the fleet manager changes, the leasing company asks for the maintenance history, and the answer is an afternoon of archaeology.
Gurtam’s own answer is Fleetrun, a separate application for planning services and tracking their cost. It is a reasonable fit if you want the whole maintenance workflow from the platform vendor and are happy to run another paid app. But plenty of fleets want something narrower: keep Wialon’s intervals, add the history, and stop paying for a second system.
What a service record should contain
If you are going to keep a log at all, keep one that answers the questions somebody will actually ask:
- What was done, on which unit, and when.
- The odometer and engine hours at the time — and they should be validated against what the vehicle actually reports, so a typo cannot travel into your cost per kilometre.
- Parts with quantities and costs, and labour with hours and rates, because “the service cost €480” is not a number you can question later.
- Attachments — the invoice, the workshop report, a photo. Under 10 MB each is plenty for a PDF or a picture.
- Where it was done and a comment, for everything that does not fit a field.
That set covers the warranty claim, the leasing return, the cost-per-kilometre report and the argument with a workshop about work that was billed twice.
Keep it in the platform, not beside it
Here is the part fleets get wrong. A maintenance log that lives in a third-party tool is a hostage: it is complete right up until you stop paying for that tool, and then it is an export nobody reimports.
The better arrangement is to write the record back into the platform. In FleetTAB, a completed service becomes a native Wialon maintenance event on the unit, and attachments are saved into that unit’s file storage in Wialon. The vehicle carries its own history. Switch FleetTAB off and the log is still there, on the units, in the account you already pay for — which is also the reason it survives a change of fleet manager, a change of tool, or a change of mind.
The intervals and the log then work as one thing: an interval tells you a service is due, registering the service updates the baseline, and the record of what was done sits on the vehicle rather than in a folder.
Due, overdue, and the state that matters
Three states carry almost all the operational value:
- OK — nothing to do.
- Due — inside the warning margin you set, which is when parts get ordered and a slot gets booked.
- Overdue — past the interval, which on a leased or warrantied vehicle is a cost, not a chore.
Counting them across the fleet is the number a manager actually wants on a Monday: how many vehicles are overdue right now. One figure, not a list of a hundred intervals to read.
If you are choosing an approach
Three honest options, in increasing order of how much process you want:
- Wialon alone. Intervals plus Maintenance notifications. Free, already there, no history.
- Wialon plus FleetTAB. Intervals, a service log with parts, labour, costs and attachments, all written back onto the unit as Wialon maintenance events. Free on your own account, one API token, nothing migrated.
- Fleetrun or another dedicated maintenance app. More workflow — planning, cost centres, procurement — as a separate product with its own subscription.
Most fleets that come to us are on the first option and did not realise they were, because the history they thought existed turned out to be somebody’s spreadsheet.
Setting it up takes one Wialon API token, and the maintenance documentation covers what a service record holds. If a fleet runs on engine hours rather than odometer, the Assets table is the fastest way to see which of your units actually report them.
