Vendor feature lists are designed to be answered "yes" to everything. This checklist is organised the other way round: by how much each capability actually changes your operation, so that a vendor scoring well on the essentials but poorly on the situational items is correctly recognised as a good fit.
Use it alongside the requirements checklist if routing is also in scope.
Tier 1 — Essential
If a product cannot do these, it does not belong on the shortlist.
Asset register
- Unlimited custom fields on vehicles and assets
- Non-powered assets (trailers, plant, containers) as first-class records
- Status lifecycle: on order, in service, off road, disposed
- Document storage with expiry dates and automatic reminders
- Ownership and funding type (owned, leased, hired, customer-supplied)
Maintenance
- PM schedules by mileage, engine hours, calendar and combinations
- Automatic due and overdue alerts, with escalation
- Work orders with labour, parts, cost and downtime capture
- Defect and DVIR intake linked to work orders
- Vendor or internal shop workflows, with cost comparison
Compliance
- Inspection records with scheduled recurrence
- Driver licence and qualification expiry tracking
- Audit-ready export of any record set for a date range
- Immutable change history on regulated records
Reporting
- Cost per mile / per hour by vehicle and by group
- Availability and downtime
- Scheduled report delivery by email
- Raw data export without asking the vendor
Give tier 1 items a weight of 3, tier 2 a weight of 2 and tier 3 a weight of 1 — and only for the situational items that apply to you.
Tier 2 — Valuable
Strongly worth having; a shortlist can survive one or two gaps here.
Telematics integration
- Automatic odometer and engine hours capture
- Fault code (DTC) intake that can trigger a work order
- Utilisation reporting from actual movement data
- Support for your existing hardware, or a clear migration path
Parts and inventory
- Parts catalogue with supersession
- Stock levels by location, reorder points
- Parts usage linked to work orders and to specific assets
- Warranty flags and recovery tracking
Fuel and energy
- Fuel card transaction import and reconciliation
- Exception detection: volume above tank capacity, impossible locations, duplicate transactions
- Consumption trending per vehicle
- EV charging cost capture where relevant
Financial
- Depreciation and residual tracking
- Cost centre attribution and chargeback
- Budget versus actual by cost category
- Replacement modelling
Administration
- Role-based permissions with field-level control where needed
- Single sign-on
- Full audit log of user actions
- Multi-location or multi-entity structure
Tier 3 — Situational
Valuable to some fleets, irrelevant to others. Score these against your context, not in the abstract.
| Capability | Matters most when |
|---|---|
| Driver behaviour scoring | Safety programme is active and coaching capacity exists |
| Video telematics review workflow | Collision defence or insurance premium is a major cost |
| Tyre management | Heavy fleet, tyres are a top-three cost line |
| Tolls and congestion charge reconciliation | Urban or heavily tolled network |
| Multi-currency and multi-country | Cross-border operation |
| Mobile inspection app | Drivers perform their own checks |
| Customer chargeback / billing | Vehicles serve external clients |
| EV-specific management | Electrification underway |
| Emissions and CO₂ reporting | Regulatory or contractual reporting duty |
| Yard and pool booking | Shared vehicles across departments |
Questions that expose shallow implementations
Most products can claim every tier 1 item. These questions separate depth from checkbox:
- PM scheduling: can a single schedule combine "every 15,000 km or 6 months, whichever comes first", with a tolerance window and automatic rescheduling from the actual service date?
- Work orders: can a job be split across internal labour and an external vendor, with both costs on one record?
- Documents: can a single expiry drive an escalating notification chain to different recipients at 60, 30 and 7 days?
- Odometer: when telematics and the fuel card disagree, what is the documented precedence and can I change it?
- Reporting: can I build a report the vendor did not anticipate, without professional services?
- Permissions: can a depot manager see only their own vehicles' costs, while a regional manager sees all of them?
- History: if a vehicle transfers between depots mid-year, how is its cost history reported for each depot?
- Export: can I extract every record I have entered, in a documented format, without a fee?
That last question is a contract issue as much as a technical one — see contract negotiation.
Features that sound better than they are
- "AI-powered predictive maintenance" on a fleet with no reliable maintenance history. Prediction needs data; get eighteen months of clean work orders first.
- Real-time everything. Real-time location matters; real-time cost reporting rarely changes a decision that a daily refresh would not.
- Native mobile apps for administrators. Fleet admin work happens at a desk. Judge the driver app instead.
- Configurable workflow engines. Powerful in theory, and in practice frequently a source of unmaintainable complexity built by a consultant who has since left.
Frequently asked questions
How many features should be on a shortlist requirement list?
Keep the mandatory list under 30 items. Longer lists reliably contain requirements nobody can justify, and they push vendors towards claiming capability they do not have because the list is too long to test properly.
Should I require an API even if I have no plans to integrate?
Yes. A documented, accessible API is the practical guarantee that your data is retrievable and that future integration will be possible. Treat a poorly documented or paywalled API as a serious negative regardless of current plans.
Is a mobile app essential for fleet management software?
For drivers and inspectors, yes. For fleet administrators, rarely — most administrative work is desk work, and vendors sometimes use a slick admin app to distract from a weak driver experience.
How do I test features I cannot see in a demo?
Ask for a sandbox with your own sample data, and give the vendor scripted scenarios drawn from your real operation. Anything that cannot be demonstrated in a sandbox should be treated as unproven and reflected in your scoring.
What if one vendor is strong on maintenance and another on compliance?
Weight the tiers against your actual risk. A fleet with heavy audit exposure should not buy the better workshop tool, and vice versa. Where both are genuinely critical, evaluate a two-product approach with a defined integration rather than compromising on both.
