New Feature: Linking Employees to Unrented Cars — always know who is responsible for every vehicle in your fleet

The problem: what happens to your cars outside contracts?

Rental records cover only one slice of a car's life: the period a customer holds it under a contract. But what about the rest of the time? Washing, maintenance, moving cars between branches, delivering a car to a customer at another location, a post-repair test drive — all real trips made by employees, and none of them recorded by any contract. In KIRA's measurements across tracked fleets on the platform, roughly two-thirds of fleet vehicle movements happen outside any active rental contract.

The bigger the fleet and the more employees you have, the wider this grey zone grows: dozens of cars moving every day with no record of who holds them now, when they took them, or when they brought them back. The result isn't just a lack of oversight — it's a real bill the company ends up paying, as we'll see.

What is employee–vehicle assignment?

The idea is simple: just as every rental contract has a customer responsible for the car throughout the rental, you can now name a responsible employee for any unrented car. From the moment of assignment until it is released, the system records that this car is in this employee's custody — by name, with the handover time.

• One responsible person per car: a car can never be in two employees' custody at once — so there is never any ambiguity about who holds it right now.
• The contract always takes priority: if the car has an active rental contract, the contract's customer is automatically the responsible party — the feature covers the gaps between contracts and never conflicts with them.
• A complete record: every custody period is kept with its start and end — so you can go back to any moment in the past and ask: who was holding this car then?
• No extra hardware: assignment is done straight from the car's page in the system — even cars with no tracking device get the full benefit of the feature.

A fine with no contract — who pays it?

This is where the feature's real value shows. When a traffic fine arrives for a period covered by a rental contract, the matter is settled: the renter is known by name and contract. But when a fine arrives for a period not covered by any contract — far more common than you'd expect — it is registered against the company, and the question every fleet manager knows begins: "who was driving it that day?".

Without a custody record, that question has no answer: days pass, nobody remembers, nobody admits it, and the company pays out of its own pocket for a violation committed by a specific person. Repeated across a large fleet, these "lost" fines turn into a real monthly loss item.

With employee–vehicle assignment, the answer exists before the question is asked: the fine's date and time fall inside a custody period recorded under a specific employee's name — so you know instantly who it belongs to, and hold them accountable with a documented record rather than memory and guesswork. That alone changes driving behaviour: an employee who knows the car is registered in their custody drives differently.

Higher control through fleet tracking

The feature doesn't stop at the record. For subscribers to KIRA's fleet-tracking service, the current responsible employee for every unrented car appears directly on the tracking screen — next to its live location and status. So when you see a car moving on the map with no contract, you don't need to call three people to find out who's driving: the name is right in front of you.

• Live location + responsible employee on one screen: you see where the car is and who holds it at the same moment.
• Assign and release from the tracking screen itself: your monitoring team never has to leave the map to record a car being taken or returned.
• Real oversight of movement outside contracts: with custody recorded, an unrented car's trips carry a responsible name — so unauthorized use surfaces instead of dissolving into the noise of a busy fleet.

How the feature works in practice

The feature is built to be faster than any paper custody log:

• From the car's page: open any unrented car in the system, pick the responsible employee, and you're done — the custody record has started.
• Employees can register themselves: an employee taking a car can record themselves as responsible for it on their own — no waiting for approval or going back to management every time.
• The owner assigns anyone: the company owner can assign any employee to any car, and controls the permission for who may assign others.
• Releasing is just as easy: car returned? End the custody period with one click — and the full period stays preserved in the record.
• And when a new contract is created: you don't need to do anything — the contract takes over automatically for its full duration, and once it ends you assign the next responsible employee just as easily.

Who this is for, and how to get started

Every rental company benefits from a custody record, but the value multiplies with scale: a company with dozens of cars and a large staff lives this problem daily — cars moving with no record, fines arriving with no owner, personal use hiding in the crowd. For these companies especially, the feature turns the fleet's biggest grey zone into a tight record with a known responsible person for every car at every moment.

The feature is available now in the KIRA system from the car's page, and for tracking-service subscribers from the tracking screen as well. Log in to your dashboard and try it on the first unrented car in your fleet — or contact us to learn more about the KIRA system and fleet tracking.