Record who insures a vehicle and who to call when it breaks down

Introduction

Every vehicle in your fleet is insured by somebody, and most are covered by a breakdown service as well. RentVisie keeps both as small address-book records: one holding the insurer's name, your policy number and a phone number, the other holding the same three things for the breakdown firm. Each vehicle record then points at one of each.

You build the records once, on two lists reached from the Assets menu — Insurances and Emergency Contacts — and then pick them per vehicle on the vehicle record's Insurance tab. The records are shared, so a fleet on one policy needs one insurance record that every vehicle points at, not one per car.

You come here when:

• a car has been damaged or has broken down and you need the insurer's or the recovery firm's number in front of you;
• a new vehicle has just been added and its insurance boxes are empty;
• the fleet has moved to a new insurer or a new policy number and the record has to change;
• somebody asks what cover a particular car carries before you rent it out.

This is the vehicle's own insurance, not the cover a customer buys. They share the word and nothing else. The excess-waiver or damage cover a customer pays for is a priced line on the booking, added with the booking's Insurances button, and it lives on its own page: Change the vehicle or class on a booking. Nothing you do here changes a booking's price, deposit or excess, and nothing a customer buys changes what is on this page.

Words these screens use

Two of the names below are not what you would guess from the tile, so it is worth a look before you go in:

Every way to reach this

How to use

Configuration

Nothing has to be switched on. The two lists start empty and you fill them in as you go.

Build the records before you touch a vehicle, because it is the cleaner of the two routes — the New buttons on a vehicle record behave differently from each other, as the walkthrough below explains.

Add an insurance record

1. From the main menu, open Assets, then click Insurances. The screen headed Insurance opens, one row per record, with the columns Insurance type, Insurance company, Insurance customer number and Insurance company phone.
2. Click New Insurance above the list. A screen headed Insurances opens.
3. Pick a Branch if the policy belongs to one particular branch. Leave it empty otherwise.
4. Choose an Insurance type. These are three buttons, not a drop-down, and one is always chosen: ThirdPartyLiability to begin with. The three read ThirdPartyLiability (third-party only), LimitedComprehensive (third party plus fire, theft and glass) and FullRisk (everything). In Dutch they show as WA, WA+ and the full-cover wording.
5. Fill in Insurance company with the insurer's name and Customer number with your policy number. Both are free text.
6. Pick the country in CountryCode — the box is labelled with the word "code" but lists countries by their full name — and type the number in Phone. The phone box takes anything; nothing checks the shape of it.
7. Click Save. The record appears in the list straight away, tagged to your company, so colleagues see it too. Cancel throws the whole thing away.

Add a breakdown record

1. From the main menu, open Assets, then click Emergency Contacts. The screen headed Breakdown Assistance opens.
2. Click New Breakdown assistance. A screen headed Breakdown assistance opens.
3. Fill in Branch, Assistance company, Customer number, DialCode and Phone. It is the same form as the insurance one minus the cover type.
4. Click Save.

To change a record later, click the pencil icon at the end of its row; to remove one, click the bin icon beside it. Both icons are unlabelled.

Before you start: the Insurances and Emergency Contacts tiles sit on only one of the two versions of the Assets screen. The version an ordinary staff account gets has neither, so in practice this is Company admin work. On the vehicle record the split is finer: an ordinary staff account can pick an insurance in the drop-down and save the vehicle, but creating a new insurance or a new breakdown record from there needs Company admin.

Using the Insurance tab on a vehicle

From the main menu, open Assets. On the Vehicles tab, double-click the vehicle's row to open its record, then click the Insurance tab — the ninth along, after Maintenance and before Financial. It holds two drop-downs, one above the other: Insurance and Breakdown assistance. Each lists the records you built above by the firm's name.

1. Open the Insurance drop-down and pick the policy this vehicle is on. To take a vehicle off a policy, clear the box instead.
2. Open the Breakdown assistance drop-down and pick the recovery firm.
3. Click Save at the bottom of the vehicle record. Nothing is stored until you do, and Cancel discards it.

Beside each drop-down sit a New and an Edit button. Edit only appears once something is picked, and opens that record for changing. New builds a record from here instead of from the list — but read the warning below first.

You filled in a new insurance, pressed Save, and the box is still empty. The New button beside the Insurance drop-down saves the record but never ties it to the vehicle. The one beside Breakdown assistance does tie it. So after creating an insurance from a vehicle record, go back to the Insurance drop-down, pick the record you have just made, and press Save on the vehicle itself.

A worked example. A Renault Clio, plate 12-ABC-3, has just been added to the fleet. Your whole fleet is on one Allianz Benelux policy, number NL-88123, and covered by ANWB Wegenwacht under membership WW-4471.

You open Assets, click Insurances, and find the Allianz Benelux row already there from last time: FullRisk, NL-88123, +31 20 555 0199. Nothing to add. You do the same on Emergency Contacts and find ANWB Wegenwacht, WW-4471, +31 88 269 2222.

You then go back to Assets, open 12-ABC-3, click the Insurance tab, pick Allianz Benelux in the top drop-down and ANWB Wegenwacht in the bottom one, and click Save. Two months later the Clio is rear-ended; you open its record, click Insurance, see Allianz Benelux in the top drop-down and click Edit beside it to read NL-88123 and +31 20 555 0199.

Key details

The tab shows the firm's name and nothing else. Both drop-downs are labelled with the company name only — no policy number, no phone number. To read those, click Edit beside the drop-down, or open the record from the Insurances or Emergency Contacts list, where all three columns are on screen at once. If you are ringing round, the list is the faster screen.

One of each, per vehicle. A vehicle carries exactly one insurance record and one breakdown record. There is no place to record a second policy, an excess amount, a start or end date, or a renewal reminder — the record is the insurer's name, your number with them, and a phone number.

An edit reaches every vehicle on that record. Correcting a phone number on the Allianz Benelux record fixes it for all forty cars pointing at it, which is the point. But Edit on one vehicle's tab is not a private change: if one car really is on a different policy, build it a second record rather than editing the shared one.

Deleting a record does not warn you that vehicles are using it. The bin icon on either list asks Are you sure? and nothing more — it does not count the vehicles on that policy or offer to move them. Every vehicle pointing at it keeps working; its box just goes empty, with nothing said and nothing to undo. Check the fleet before you delete an insurer you are replacing, or build the new record, move the vehicles over, and delete the old one last.

Nothing else in RentVisie appears to read these records. They do not print on a rental agreement, travel onto a damage claim, reach a customer or affect a price. The vehicle's tab and the two lists are the only places they surface. Treat them as your fleet's address book, not as a control.

Non-vehicle items have the tab too. A trailer or other item added on the Other tab of the fleet list carries the same Insurance tab, eighth along on that shorter record.

Both lists show your company's records only, and a record you create is tagged to your company automatically, whichever route you use.

What to do next. If you have just built the records, walk the fleet list and set the two drop-downs on every vehicle that is missing them — the vehicle record is the only place they show. If you came here after a damage, the claim itself is recorded separately: open the vehicle's Damages tab and see Record damage during an inspection. And if what you actually wanted was the cover a customer pays for, that is on Change the vehicle or class on a booking.

Q&A

I filled in a new insurance from the vehicle's Insurance tab, pressed Save, and the drop-down is still empty. Where did it go? Nowhere — it saved. It just did not attach itself. The New button beside the Insurance drop-down creates and saves the record but leaves the vehicle's own box untouched, unlike the New beside Breakdown assistance, which does fill it in. Open the Insurance drop-down, pick the record you just made, and press Save at the bottom of the vehicle record. Nothing was lost and nothing was created twice.

I pressed New and the form has no Save button. Creating an insurance record from a vehicle is restricted to Company admin, so on an ordinary staff account the form opens with only Cancel and Back on it. Press Cancel, and either ask a Company admin to add the record, or pick one that already exists in the drop-down — that part you are allowed to do.

My Assets screen has no Insurances tile. There are two versions of the Assets screen and only one carries the Insurances and Emergency Contacts tiles; the version an ordinary staff account gets has neither. You can still read and set a vehicle's insurance on its own record's Insurance tab. To build or change the records themselves, ask your Company admin.

Why does the Emergency Contacts list say "Insurance company"? Its three column headings were copied from the insurance list and never renamed. On the screen headed Breakdown Assistance, Insurance company, Insurance customer number and Insurance company phone all show the breakdown firm's details, not an insurer's. The form you open from it is labelled correctly, as Assistance company.

I changed a phone number on one vehicle and now every vehicle shows the new one. That is the design. The records are shared and a vehicle only points at one. If this car genuinely has a different insurer, put the old number back, then build a second insurance record on the Insurances list and pick that one on this vehicle instead.

Can I delete an insurer that vehicles are still using? Yes. The bin icon asks Are you sure? and that is the only check — it does not tell you how many vehicles are on that policy. The vehicles survive with an empty Insurance box. Move them onto the replacement record first.

What do the three insurance types mean, and can I add a fourth? ThirdPartyLiability is third-party only, LimitedComprehensive is third party plus fire, theft and glass, and FullRisk is all risks. The list is fixed — there is no way to add your own. One is always selected; a brand-new record starts on ThirdPartyLiability, so change it if that is not what you hold.

What does the Branch box do? It records which of your branches holds the policy or the membership, and it is safe to leave empty. Neither list is filtered by branch, so filling it in does not hide the record from colleagues at other branches — treat it as a note about who keeps the paperwork.

There is a country box and a phone box. Do I need both? The country box holds the dialling country and the phone box holds the number; they are stored separately and neither is checked or joined up. Fill in both if you want the record to be unambiguous, or type the full international number into Phone and leave the country box alone.

A car has broken down and its Insurance tab is empty. What now? Open Assets, then Emergency Contacts, and use the firm your fleet is signed up with — its row carries the membership number and the phone number. The tab being empty means nobody linked this vehicle, not that it has no cover. Deal with the breakdown first, then set the two drop-downs on the vehicle record and save, so the next person does not have to ask.

Does the insurer show up on the rental agreement or on a damage claim? No. Nothing seems to print these records or copy them anywhere; they exist to be looked up on screen. A damage claim records its own cover details separately.

The Insurance tab only shows a company name. Where is the phone number? Behind the Edit button next to the drop-down — the tab itself carries nothing but the two names. If you have a customer or a recovery driver waiting, go to Assets, then Insurances or Emergency Contacts instead: those lists put the firm, the customer number and the phone number in one row.

Can I see which vehicles are on a given policy? Not from the Insurances list — it has no vehicle column and no count. You would have to open vehicles one at a time and read the Insurance tab.

Related pages:

• Change the vehicle or class on a booking — the other kind of insurance: the cover a customer buys, and what it does to the deposit and excess.
• Add a vehicle to your fleet — everything else on the vehicle record.
• Record damage during an inspection — where a damage is written down once the insurer has been called.
• Link a tracker to a vehicle and follow it on the map — finding a broken-down vehicle before you ring the recovery firm.