Knowledge base for garages and vehicle repair when you need your own history for a vehicle, not just the manufacturer data.

No. The duplicate of the report must be kept for five years and shown to the motor vehicle authorities on request; keeping it on a data medium is permitted as long as, until the period ends, it can be reproduced at any time with identical content, complete, in order and true to the original. Your existing process remains responsible for that, and nothing about it changes. The knowledge base adds the reports alongside your own job history, the photos and what the mechanic said about the car. In the first weeks after go-live, try it with a regular customer to see whether what was flagged the year before shows up at the next appointment.

You can ask about what you documented: the purchase contract with the shortened warranty period, the handover record, photos of the car’s condition at handover, correspondence – the answer gives the date and the source. With cars in particular, a lot depends on two dates: shortening the period to one year only takes effect if it was individually negotiated and more than one year has passed since the car was first registered. Both dates are in your documents and can be looked up side by side. Whether the shortening was validly agreed in a particular case is not something the system assesses; that’s what your legal adviser is for.

Werbas knows which items were billed. What could be seen in the photos of the damage, what the mechanic said in a voice note, what the independent assessor’s report says and what the same customer complained about two years ago are usually not in there – and those are the documents this is about. Before we start, we check whether and how Werbas can be connected; access is read-only – nothing is written back, no job is created and no line item is changed. We don’t connect manufacturer portals, but anything you save from them as a PDF can go in and is cited as a source.

If the recall information is in the knowledge base and the vehicle and job data from Werbas are connected, you can ask by model series, year of manufacture and period; for each vehicle, the answer shows why it is on the list. How complete the list is depends on the data – check that in the first weeks after go-live with a recall where you know which vehicles were affected. If the system finds nothing for a vehicle, it tells you so. It can draft the letters to customers; you decide who gets them and when they go out.