Fleet compliance reminders for couriers

Amazon Flex · Evri · Royal Mail Self-Employed · Deliveroo · Uber Eats · Just Eat

If you drive for a delivery platform, your van is your business. An expired MOT or a clamped vehicle can cost a day's work and put your account at risk. Fleetkeep watches every van's MOT, road tax and insurance dates and emails you at 60, 30, 14 and 7 days before each is due. No app to install; plans start from £6.67/month for 2 vehicles when billed annually, or £8/month on monthly billing, after the trial.

Why couriers slip on compliance

It's a thin-margin job done in 12-hour shifts. Three things make it specifically harder for couriers than for anyone else running vans:

• Multiple vehicles in rotation. If you have a primary van and a backup, or if you're an independent Flex operator with three or four drivers, every vehicle is on its own MOT cycle. The dates do not line up.
• The reminder letter goes to the registered keeper. If you bought a van second-hand and haven't updated the V5C, the V11 tax reminder is going to the previous owner. Nobody's flagging it for you.
• You don't park near a desk. Most paperwork lives in a glovebox. The £80 late-licensing letter or the V11 lands at home while you're out delivering for a 13-hour day. By the time it's noticed it's late.

What Amazon Flex, Evri and Royal Mail require

Each platform has its own contract. Across the UK delivery platforms we've checked, the minimum standards on a powered four-wheel vehicle look broadly similar, but always read your own platform's exact requirements (mopeds, scooters and bicycles are governed differently, and platform terms change):

• A current MOT: usually evidenced by a recent photograph of the certificate or a DVSA online check.
• Current road tax: a DVLA online lookup will catch a lapse within hours.
• Hire & reward insurance, not standard Social Domestic & Pleasure. Standard SDP is void the moment you accept a paid delivery. Most providers underwrite "courier" cover specifically.
• A valid driving licence with no disqualification, driver-level rather than vehicle, but worth tracking for self-employed operators with multiple drivers.

Fleetkeep tracks the three vehicle items above. Driver licence checks belong in your HR / driver management system, not a vehicle compliance tool.

The maths on a single missed MOT

A typical Amazon Flex shift is £52 to £70 net of fuel for a 4-hour block. Miss a day for a clamped van and the cost stacks fast:

• Lost shift earnings: £100 to £160 for a working day.
• Recovery / declamp fee if it's been clamped: £100 release.
• Late-licensing letter from DVLA: £40 if paid quickly, £80 if not.
• Backdated tax: £30 to £80 depending on band.
• Worst case: up to £1,000 for driving with no MOT (£2,500 if the vehicle is in a dangerous condition), plus invalidated insurance on any incident in the lapsed window.

One reminder you saw costs far less than a clamped van.

How Fleetkeep handles a courier fleet

Sign in with Google, paste the registrations of every van you operate (manually or as a CSV upload up to 50 at a time), and we pull MOT, tax and vehicle data from DVLA's published services. Then:

• Email reminders 60, 30, 14 and 7 days before every MOT, tax, insurance and service date.
• Optional second contact, so reminders also land in a partner / office manager's inbox.
• Dashboard sorted by what's due first; red for items in 7 days, amber for 30, green for everything else.
• One-click drill into a vehicle to see the full DVSA MOT history, including past failures and advisories.
• Pricing by vehicle count, not drivers. Start with a 30-day trial.

Worked example: a 4-van Flex operator

You're running an Amazon Flex sub-operation: yourself plus three drivers, four Transit Customs and a backup Vivaro. Five vans. Five MOT dates, five tax dates, five insurance dates. Without a tracking system most operators will:

• Forget the backup van's MOT (it's on the rotation least often).
• Miss a tax renewal on the van bought second-hand last summer because the V11 reminder went to the previous owner.
• Renew insurance reactively when the broker calls, not proactively.

With Fleetkeep, all five vans are on one screen, sorted by next renewal. The backup van's reminder lands in the inbox 30 days before its MOT. The second-hand van's tax shows up regardless of where the V11 went. Insurance dates are filed in advance so you can shop around three weeks before renewal rather than accepting whatever the renewal quote happens to be.

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