Add and manage vehicles

What it's about

In the Vehicles module, you gather every vehicle in the family in one place – car, electric car, motorbike, scooter, e-scooter, bicycle, pedelec, trailer or caravan.

Adding a vehicle

Tap “Add vehicle” and choose the vehicle kind. Nothing beyond a name is required – everything else you can add later. A photo is optional: if you don't upload one, the tile shows a suitable icon.

Gallery: seeing and filtering keepers

Every vehicle tile shows small chips for who the vehicle belongs to. With several vehicles, patchio shows a filter bar above the gallery: by vehicle kind (cars, motorbikes, bicycles & scooters, trailers) and by keeper. That way you find “Mum's bike” or “all cars” with one tap.

Detail view: see first, then edit

Tap a vehicle tile and you land on the detail page – an overview rather than straight into the edit dialogue. At the top, you see the key figures (odometer reading, next deadline with a traffic light, average consumption, costs), and below, cards for events, odometer, fuel & charging, servicing, costs & contracts, insurance, documents, bookability and accidents. Every card has a “Manage ›” that opens the edit dialogue right at the relevant spot.

Two quick actions sit at the top: “Log fuel” (a lightweight dialogue for amount, odometer reading and price – anyone who can see the vehicle can use it) and “Edit” (for vehicle managers).

Finding older entries

The three long lists – fuel & charging, odometer and servicing & repairs – show the five most recent entries. Anything older is one tap away, behind “View more … entries in the archive”.

In the archive, you narrow things down two ways: via the year chips (All, 2026, 2025 …) and via the search field. There, you can enter a date, an odometer reading – with a full stop too, just as it appears in the list – and, for servicing, keywords from the description, category or repair shop, “timing belt”, say. A counter above the list shows how many entries are currently in view.

Good to know: only the display is limited. Your average consumption, current odometer reading, the mileage trend, logbook costs and the CSV exports always take all entries into account – including those in the archive. With five or fewer entries, there's no archive button at all.

Profiles: why you see different fields depending on the vehicle

patchio derives a profile from the vehicle kind and shows you only the fields that make sense:

• Registered vehicles (car, motorbike, motorhome, trailer): number plate, chassis number (FIN), first registration.
• Insurance-plate vehicles (moped, scooter up to 50cc, e-scooter, S-Pedelec): insurance plate and operating licence.
• Bicycles and pedelecs: frame number and anti-theft coding.

For ambiguous types (e-scooter, pedelec, quad), patchio briefly asks about top speed and assigns the right profile accordingly.

Who can see what?

Per vehicle, you choose the visibility: the whole household, selected people only, or just you. And you assign who the vehicle belongs to.

Company cars

Mark a vehicle as a company car, and its fuel and servicing costs don't count towards the family budget – consumption is still calculated.

Giving up a vehicle: archive or delete

Giving up a vehicle gives you two routes. You'll find both when you open the vehicle and tap “Edit” – bottom left in the dialogue.

Archiving is the gentle route: the vehicle disappears from the gallery, but all the data stays intact. Good if you still need the history – for tax purposes, say, or because you might add the car back later.

Deleting really clears it out, and permanently. Before patchio touches anything, you get a breakdown with figures: how many fuel entries, odometer readings, servicing records, documents, deadlines and accident reports are affected – and how many files will disappear from storage. Only once you've read and confirmed this does the deletion happen.

What goes with it

Everything that exists only because of the vehicle: fuel and charging entries, odometer readings, servicing records, deadlines along with the events they generated in the calendar (and their reminders), documents in the vault, insurance data on the vehicle, accident reports with their photos, sketches and signatures, the vehicle photo, the keeper assignment, and the permissions.

What stays

• Your expenses stay. Fuel bought and repair-shop bills paid are entries in your household finances. They only lose the vehicle link, but stay in full in the finance overview. Otherwise your insights from last month would suddenly look different after the deletion than they did before – and that wouldn't be a deletion, it would be rewriting history.
• Contracts stay. A running motor insurance policy is a contract, not an add-on to the car. patchio doesn't cancel it – you do that yourself with your insurer.
• Events stay. If you'd made the vehicle a bookable resource, its calendar events stay in place. Only the vehicle booking on them goes. A deleted car shouldn't tear a family outing out of your calendar.

The preview only ever shows you what you're allowed to see anyway. If an expense is private, it won't appear in your breakdown – it stays intact regardless.

Who can delete?

Only someone with the “Manage vehicles” permission and who can see the vehicle at all. For a vehicle visible only to you, no one else can clear it out.

Turning on the module

The Vehicles module is optional. An admin turns it on under Manage → Modules.