Manage Your Small Fleet: Vehicle Tracking for Irish SMEs

The Irish SME vehicle reality

A typical small Irish business with vehicles on the road looks something like this:

• The plumber / electrician / carpenter — 1 van for the owner-operator, 2–3 for employees. All Category N1, all on independent CVRT anniversaries
• The small delivery business — 3–5 vans running daily routes. Vehicle uptime is revenue-critical; a van off-road for a day costs real money
• The sales rep / consultancy team — 2–4 passenger cars (M1) on company lease or ownership, often with BIK in play. NCT rather than CVRT
• Mixed fleet — 1 crew cab, 2 vans, 1 commercial jeep — a mix of N1 (CVRT) and M1 (NCT) classifications

Across any of these, one person typically ends up as the "vehicle admin" — the owner, the office manager, or whoever happened to answer the phone when the insurance renewal call came. Their toolset is usually:

• A whiteboard in the unit with expiry dates scrawled in marker
• A shared Google Sheet that's accurate for 3 months then goes stale
• Email folders named "insurance" and "tax" with no reminders
• Someone's memory (variable)
• Nothing formal — "we'll sort it when the letter comes"

What goes wrong without a system

CVRT — what every SME needs to know

The Commercial Vehicle Roadworthiness Test (CVRT) is the commercial equivalent of the NCT, but it's a separate system — different centres, different booking, different frequency, and it's run by a network of ~600 authorised private test centres overseen by the RSA, not by NCTS.

Who needs CVRT?

• Light commercials (Category N1, ≤3.5t): vans, pickups, panel vans — annually from the 1st anniversary of first registration
• Heavy commercials (N2, N3, >3.5t): rigid trucks, HGVs — annually from year 1
• Buses and trailers: annually from year 1
• Exempt: converted crew-cabs and some pickups registered as M1 passenger-carrying — these fall under NCT

How to book

Bookings are made at cvrt.ie or directly with an authorised CVR test centre. Search by county for your nearest. You cannot book CVRT through NCTS.ie — the systems are separate.

Fees (2026)

• Light commercial (N1): ~€124.07 incl. VAT
• Partial re-test (if your vehicle failed on minor items): ~€31.71
• Heavy commercial: variable depending on vehicle category and type — check at cvrt.ie

Private-use loophole — there isn't one

A common misconception: "it's my personal van, I don't use it for work, I'm on NCT." Not true. CVRT liability is determined by the vehicle's classification on the VRC — if it's N1, it's CVRT-liable regardless of how you drive it. You cannot reclassify by declaration. The only route to NCT classification is to formally re-register the vehicle as M1 passenger at Revenue, which is a heavy process and rarely worth it.

Why enterprise fleet tools don't fit an Irish SME

The established fleet-management names are built for 50+ vehicles, long contracts and GPS telematics. For a 3–5 van tradesperson the maths and the feature set are both wrong:

None of the enterprise tools handle CVRT reminders, Irish motor tax cycles, or the Revenue mileage / BIK context that matters for Irish SMEs. They're built as global GPS-telematics products with generic service logging grafted on. For an Irish plumber with 3 vans, the question isn't "how do we save €40 per driver per month on fuel via route optimisation?" — it's "has anyone booked the CVRT on the white van?"

What odo.ie offers Irish SMEs today — Solo and Family

Start here. Solo is free forever for one vehicle; Family (€4/month, or €3/month billed yearly) covers up to 3 vehicles with co-driver sharing — a natural fit for many small Irish trades:

• 1 vehicle on Solo (free), 3 on Family (€4/mo) — cars, vans, motorbikes. Each with its own dashboard
• Independent NCT / motor tax / insurance reminders per vehicle — 30, 14, 7 and 1-day advance alerts, configurable per type
• Service history per vehicle — date, mileage, garage, cost, notes. Full history printable/exportable for resale or warranty
• Fuel / charging tracking in L/100km and kWh/100km, with station names (Circle K Naas, Applegreen Portlaoise, Home, ESB ecars Dunkettle)
• Cost analytics per vehicle — monthly spend, year-over-year, trailing 12-month average, year-end forecast
• "Coming up" timeline across all your vehicles merged and sorted by urgency. Green/amber/red health dots per card
• .ics calendar sync — subscribe from Google / Apple / Outlook; share with whoever handles admin
• JSON / CSV / PDF export — one-click, accountant-ready
• PWA install, offline support, no ads, no data selling — runs on any phone or laptop

A lot of single-van / 2-van / 3-van businesses never need anything beyond this. It's designed for exactly that operating size.

odo.ie Pro — growing to 10 vehicles

When the business outgrows 3 vehicles, or when tax-time mileage claims become a real issue, Pro is the step up. Pricing and features as of April 2026:

Pricing: €8/month or €6/month billed yearly (two months free on the annual plan). For a 5-vehicle SME, Pro's annual price works out to roughly €14.40 per vehicle per year — orders of magnitude cheaper than Fleetio Essential or TomTom Webfleet. Family (€4/month, or €3/month billed yearly) covers 3 vehicles and is sufficient for owner- operator trades; Pro scales to 10 vehicles and adds the Revenue-ready mileage logbook. Details onodo.ie/pro.

odo Fleet — unlimited vehicles, coming soon

For SMEs with 10+ vehicles, multiple drivers, or compliance- heavy operations, the upcoming odo Fleet tier is in development. Planned feature set:

• Everything in Pro
• Unlimited vehicles — beyond the Pro 10-vehicle cap
• Multi-user access — separate logins for owner, office admin, drivers, with role-based permissions
• Driver assignment — assign vehicles to specific drivers
• Driver licence tracking — each driver's licence expiry with its own reminders (critical for commercial driver compliance)
• Trip attribution to drivers — who drove which van on which day
• Fleet-wide reporting — compliance overview: all CVRT / insurance / tax / licence dates at a glance
• Bulk reports — one-click period-scoped PDF reports for accountant or regulator
• Consolidated invoicing — single invoice for the whole fleet, rather than per-seat billing
• Mileage & subsistence expense sync — flow trip data into expense systems
• Contact sales for Fleet tier pricing and rollout timing at odo.ie/pro

The pitch

Start free on Solo today. Family (€4/month, or €3/month billed yearly) covers up to 3 vehicles with co-driver sharing. If the business grows, Pro adds up to 10 vehicles plus the Revenue- ready trip logbook for €8/month (or€6/month billed yearly) — less than the cost of one missed CVRT appointment for a single vehicle, let alone a day of missed jobs because of an expired cert. When you cross 10 vehicles, Fleet is the next step.

No GPS trackers to install. No 3-year contracts. No hardware to mount. No driver surveillance. Just the reminders, the records, and the reports you actually need — built for Irish vehicles, Irish compliance, Irish tax rules.

Frequently asked questions