What this guide covers
How to record an accident involving one of our vehicles: opening the report, capturing the police case, the third party and the insurance claim, booking the repair, and closing it with a finding.
It also covers the thing people ask first: this is not a disciplinary record, and it does not turn into one. If the driving warrants a disciplinary case, that is raised separately in the Incident Log. A single accident can have both. They stay separate on purpose.
Who can do what
- Fleet accident management (
FLEET_ACCIDENT_MANAGE) — open, edit, run and close accident reports. Dispatch and fleet admin can do all of this too. - The driver named on a report — can read their own report and add their own statement to it, with no special permission. They cannot edit the rest of it.
- Everybody else — sees nothing. An accident report carries a third party's contact details and, when somebody was hurt, health information about a colleague, so it is deliberately not open to every fleet user the way a vehicle's location is.
- Cost figures (the excess, the estimated damage) need a second permission on top — fleet admin, fleet service, or accounting. Opening the record does not mean seeing the money.
How a report runs
Opening a report
Two ways in.
From the driver's report at the scene. If the driver already reported it from the vehicle page (Report a problem → type Accident), go to Fleet → Events, find it and press Accident report. That carries the vehicle, the reporter, the description and the GPS position straight across, so nobody retypes it days later from memory. Pressing it twice is safe — you land on the report that already exists, not a second one.
From scratch. Fleet → Accident Reports → New accident report. Choose the vehicle, and fill in what you have.
Only the vehicle is required. Everything else — the case number, the third party's insurer, who was at fault — usually arrives over the following days, and a form that insisted on them up front would just get filled in with guesses. A guessed police case number is worse than a blank one.
Leaving the driver blank is fine and often correct. A vehicle hit while parked has no driver. A contractor driving it is not one of our users — type their name in the box beside the picker instead. The report will read "No driver (vehicle unattended)" rather than leaving an empty space that looks like missing data.
Fault is not a field you have to fill in yet
Every report starts at not yet determined, and nothing sets it for you. Move it only when somebody has actually decided. The options are our driver at fault, third party at fault, fault shared, nobody at fault, and not yet determined.
This is the whole reason the accident register is separate from the disciplinary one: opening a report about a driver has to be a neutral act, or people stop opening them.
The statuses
- Reported — the record exists and the facts are going in.
- Under investigation — somebody is establishing what happened.
- Claim submitted — it is with the insurer. You need a claim number to get here; a claim with no number cannot be chased, which is the only thing the register is for at that point.
- Closed — settled, or no claim was made.
You can go straight from Reported to Claim submitted when it is clear-cut, and straight to Closed when there is no claim at all. If the insurer sends it back for more information, move it back to Under investigation — that keeps one accident as one record instead of splitting it in two and counting the same event twice.
Closing requires you to say what was concluded. That summary is the only place the outcome is recorded, and without it "closed" would mean both settled and quietly abandoned.
There is no cancel
An accident that happened cannot be un-happened, so there is no way to cancel or delete a report — that is how a vehicle's damage history stops matching the vehicle. If you opened one in error, or by duplicate, close it and say so in the summary ("duplicate of FAR-000012"). The record stays, and it stays honest.
Booking the repair
On the report, press Book the repair. That opens a service visit for body work against the same vehicle and links the two. Book it with a workshop, hand the keys over and collect it from the service visit page as usual — see Booking a vehicle in for service.
Do it this way round rather than opening a visit separately: the days off road and the repair cost then land on the fleet report already attributed to this accident.
The vehicle's status follows the service visit, not the accident report. An open accident report does not take a vehicle off the road by itself.
If the driving warrants a disciplinary case
Raise it in the Incident Log, where the employee's right to reply and the sanction lock apply, and then come back and record the incident number in the Disciplinary box on the accident report.
The two records then point at each other while staying separate: the accident is a statement of what happened, the incident is a decision about a person. There is deliberately no button here that raises a disciplinary case for you — that decision belongs in the module built for it, with its own permissions and its own reply window.
If somebody was injured
Tick Somebody was injured and record the details. A banner then appears on the report.
An injury on duty carries a statutory employer reporting obligation that HR must action separately. The accident report does not discharge it. Tell HR — do not assume that ticking the box has started anything.
The driver's statement
Every report has a driver's statement box: the driver's own account, in their own words, on the record.
The driver named on the report can write it themselves, or a manager can take it down from somebody who is not at a desk. It stays available after the report is closed — a person's account of an accident they were in does not stop being worth recording because the claim was settled.
The report's chat thread is a different thing: it is where the claim and the fault are discussed by the people running them, and the driver is not in it. Their voice on the record is the statement.
The register
Fleet → Accident Reports lists what is still open by default; untick Still open only for the full history. You can search it, and each vehicle's own accident history is on the report itself.
An accident report is numbered FAR-000123 and keeps that number for good.
Worth knowing
- A vehicle can have two open accident reports at once. Two accidents with two claims running is ordinary, not a mistake — unlike a service visit, where only one can be open.
- Editing is closed once the report is closed. Record what changed on a new report; the driver's statement can still be added to the old one.
- The chat thread on a report notifies fleet accident, dispatch and fleet admin holders. On a private vehicle it is narrowed to the people who can already see that vehicle.
- Related: Reporting and triaging vehicle events for the driver's report at the scene, and Booking a vehicle in for service for the repair.