{
  "slug": "service-events-and-publication",
  "title": "Service Events, Intervals, and Publication",
  "description": "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.",
  "track": "product",
  "kind": "article",
  "status": "in-development",
  "isRegulatoryAdjacent": false,
  "publishedAt": "2026-09-01",
  "updatedAt": "2026-09-01",
  "cfr": [
    "49 CFR 396.3"
  ],
  "related": [
    "what-is-blue-collar-parts",
    "bcp-and-part-396-recordkeeping",
    "how-the-serialized-decal-works"
  ],
  "url": "https://shopbluecollarparts.com/kb/service-events-and-publication",
  "markdownUrl": "https://shopbluecollarparts.com/kb/service-events-and-publication.md",
  "body": "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](/kb/annual-dot-inspection-requirements). Blue Collar Parts treats the annual DOT inspection as one case of a more general thing: a **service event**.\n\n## What a service event is\n\nA 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.\n\nCreating and saving a service event record is **free**. There is no charge to keep your own records.\n\n## Intervals and next service\n\nEquipment 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.\"\n\nThree interval tiers are offered — **basic**, **extended**, and **annual** — reflecting how far ahead the record commits.\n\n## What you pay for\n\nThe commercial model is deliberately narrow: **you pay when you ask for a completed service event to be published and distributed to your customer.**\n\n- Recording work: free.\n- Keeping your own record: free.\n- Publishing a customer-facing record and sending it to the equipment owner: paid, priced per publication.\n\nPrice 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.\n\nOnly a **completed** service event can be published. A draft or in-progress record cannot be sold to a customer as a finished one.\n\n## The regulatory profile is gated\n\nThere is a distinct publication profile for the FMCSA annual DOT inspection. It is **switched off**, and that is intentional rather than incidental.\n\nPublishing 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](/kb/appendix-a-inspection-standards) the report is measured against, [inspector qualification under §396.19 and §396.25](/kb/who-can-perform-dot-inspection), and the [retention rules in §396.21](/kb/dot-inspection-recordkeeping). Those gates are not all met, so the profile does not run. It will be enabled when they are — not before.\n\nThis is worth stating plainly because the opposite approach is common and bad: shipping the compliance-flavored feature first and sorting out the obligations later.\n\n## Who can see what\n\nService 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.\n\n---\n\n*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](https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-49/part-396).*",
  "license": "CC BY 4.0",
  "licenseUrl": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
}