Vehicle Manager Fleet Edition for Windows

Vehicle Manager Fleet Edition from Kaizen Software Solutions is a professional-quality vehicle inventory and maintenance database. Using it, business owners and fleet managers can track mileage, fuel use, service intervals, and repairs, and cross-reference each with tools for managing personnel such as drivers, vendors, and other contacts, and parts and materials. It simplifies the daunting task of keeping track of a large fleet of cars and trucks, but its real benefit is in keeping every vehicle serviced in a timely fashion, and in keeping track of every repair and part. It can save you money in the front office and on the shop floor every day and in the long run.

Database interfaces tend to be fairly similar--namely, dull, tabular, businesslike. Vehicle Manager Fleet Edition has an unusually clean and well-distributed main page, though. While there are plenty of the usual spreadsheet-type tables, much of the page layout will be familiar to anyone who ever tried to read a mechanic's scrawls on a service ticket. Pictures of the vehicles break up the monotony, too, though the program is all about taking care of business.

"Kaizen" is a Japanese management concept emphasizing continuous improvement. While Kaizen Software is a Silicon Valley company, its product shows the effort of refinement and the company's expertise in developing database tracking software for business. Vehicle Manager Fleet Edition is free to try with some limitations, and it's $349 to buy, which is a lot for the hobbyist but could quickly earn its keep in a hard-working fleet.