Stop buying fleet compliance you are exempt from.
Almost every fleet compliance product is built for private motor carriers, and it will quote you obligations a public entity does not have. You are exempt from most of the federal rulebook. Two parts still reach you, and in Arizona one state rule does. That is the whole scope, and it is a much smaller problem than you are being sold.
Who this is for: City and county fleets, school district transportation departments, transit agencies, and the risk or safety office that owns driver files.
Where this starts
Government fleets are excepted from 49 CFR Parts 390-399 under 49 CFR 390.3(f)(2), so federal driver-qualification files under Part 391 are not a public-entity mandate. What a public CDL employer does owe is Part 382 drug-and-alcohol testing with Clearinghouse queries and Part 383 license standards. For an Arizona school district, the state driver certification file under A.A.C. R13-13-102 applies as well.
What is built
Each item below is generated from an inventory in which every entry names the source files that implement it. Where a capability has a boundary, the boundary is printed with it.
On-demand motor vehicle record ordering for Arizona, California, Florida and Texas, plus a manual-upload path for other states.
Boundary: One-time orders. There is no continuous or ongoing record watch here, because no such scheduler exists. Arizona, California, Florida and Texas order directly and other states upload.
A 49 CFR Part 385 audit-preparation self-assessment: a 20-question scored review that surfaces gaps by category and severity.
Boundary: A self-assessment scored from your own answers, free and public at /tools/dot-audit-prep-quiz. It reads nothing from FMCSA, it is not an audit, and it is not something a subscription unlocks.
Free public calculators for the motor-carrier filing deadlines: the MCS-150 biennial due date derived from the USDOT number under 49 CFR 390.19(c), the IFTA quarterly fuel-tax return under Procedures Manual P530, and the Form 2290 heavy vehicle use tax.
Boundary: Calculators, free and public. They answer when a filing is due, on demand. Nothing is stored against a carrier and nothing fires on a due date, so do not read them as a reminder service. Every submission still happens on the agency portal.
FMCSA SAFER carrier lookup by USDOT number, with structured parsing of the returned record.
Boundary: Runs on our side, one carrier at a time, from a staff screen. There is no customer-facing lookup, no watch list and no change detection, and the SAFER snapshot does not carry safety percentiles.
A configurable rules engine that evaluates each policy against a client-defined ruleset and produces itemized deficiencies: additional-insured naming, endorsement attachment, minimum limits, days-until-expiration, carrier admitted status, carrier AM Best rating, MCS-90 minimum financial responsibility, required wording, and interested-party naming.
A multi-tenant, organization-scoped web application covering vendors, certificate holders, policies, rulesets, MVR orders, audit history, and billing settings.
Sensitive personal data is encrypted at the field level before it is written to storage.
Every server-side mutation writes an append-only audit row recording the actor, the action, the target, the timestamp and the caller fingerprint, with personal data scrubbed out of the recorded metadata before it is stored.
Boundary: Every mutation writes an append-only row naming who did it, to what, and when.
How the work happens
Separate the federal duty from the state one
A public CDL employer owes a Part 382 testing program and Part 383 licensing. It does not owe a federal Part 391 driver qualification file. An Arizona school district additionally carries the state driver certification file, which is a different rule under a different authority, and that is where most of the dated paperwork actually lives.
Track the documents you do hold
Held documents with dates on them are the work: what is on file, when it expires, and who has not sent the replacement. That is the same engine that reads and re-checks insurance certificates, pointed at a driver instead of a vendor.
Pull a record when you need one
Motor vehicle records are ordered one at a time in the four states we reach directly, and uploaded for the rest. Ordering is an event you trigger, not a subscription running in the background.
Talk to the person who builds it
Send the scope, the question, or the solicitation itself. If you are doing market research before writing one, that is a conversation we are glad to have.
We read the rules and cite them so you can check us. That is not legal advice, and an Arizona interval is worth confirming with counsel or Arizona DPS before you rely on a date.