Service Events, Intervals, and Publication
Beyond the annual inspection: how Blue Collar Parts records interval-based preventive maintenance for trucks, trailers, generators, and marine equipment, and how a completed record gets published to the equipment owner.
In development — not yet generally available
·
Cites 49 CFR 396.3
Not all equipment maintenance is a federal inspection. A generator on a job site, a boat, a trailer between annual cycles — all of it gets serviced on intervals, and none of it is covered by 49 CFR 396.17. Blue Collar Parts treats the annual DOT inspection as one case of a more general thing: a service event.
What a service event is
A service event is a dated record of work performed on a specific piece of equipment, owned by the technician or shop that performed it. It records what was done, by whom, on what, and when — and, where an interval applies, when the next service is due.
Creating and saving a service event record is free. There is no charge to keep your own records.
Intervals and next service
Equipment is serviced on a schedule, so a service event can carry a maintenance interval — the record then computes and carries its own next-service date. That is what makes a scanned decal useful to someone who is not the technician: it answers "when is this due again," not only "what happened last time."
Three interval tiers are offered — basic, extended, and annual — reflecting how far ahead the record commits.
What you pay for
The commercial model is deliberately narrow: you pay when you ask for a completed service event to be published and distributed to your customer.
- Recording work: free.
- Keeping your own record: free.
- Publishing a customer-facing record and sending it to the equipment owner: paid, priced per publication.
Price is a function of the interval tier, plus a premium where a regulatory profile applies. Whatever the price works out to at the moment you publish is snapshotted onto that publication — a later price change does not retroactively alter what you were charged or what the record says you were charged.
Only a completed service event can be published. A draft or in-progress record cannot be sold to a customer as a finished one.
The regulatory profile is gated
There is a distinct publication profile for the FMCSA annual DOT inspection. It is switched off, and that is intentional rather than incidental.
Publishing a customer-facing document that presents itself as a federal annual inspection record engages obligations that a general service record does not: the Appendix A criteria the report is measured against, inspector qualification under §396.19 and §396.25, and the retention rules in §396.21. Those gates are not all met, so the profile does not run. It will be enabled when they are — not before.
This is worth stating plainly because the opposite approach is common and bad: shipping the compliance-flavored feature first and sorting out the obligations later.
Who can see what
Service event records are owner-scoped. A technician sees their own customers, assets, and events; a request for another owner's record does not return a redacted version of it, it returns nothing. Publication is what moves a record from private to customer-visible, and it is an explicit act.
Product behavior described here is subject to change. Pricing is a launch experiment, not settled pricing. Regulatory content is informational only and is not legal advice — see 49 CFR Part 396.