Build your car’s digital service book

Why the manufacturer's records aren't the whole story

Manufacturer databases only ever hold what franchised dealers file. The moment a car moves to an independent garage — which is most cars once the warranty ends — the servicing stops being recorded anywhere a buyer can check. The work was done and the paperwork exists; it just lives in a kitchen drawer.

That is the gap a digital service book fills. It is also why the two things are different products rather than competing ones: your book holds the paperwork you have, and a service history check (£9.99) compiles the dealer-recorded servicing that no amount of uploading will conjure up. If you do both, they sit together on one report.

Every record says where it came from

The value of a service history is entirely in whether it can be believed, so the book is explicit about the origin of every entry rather than presenting one smooth timeline and hoping nobody asks.

Read from your document. The record came from a file you uploaded, and we hold that file. It is the strongest kind of entry in a book you built yourself, because there is real paperwork behind it.

Added by hand. You typed it in, for work you know was done but cannot document. Often true, and useful — but nobody should mistake it for evidence, so it is labelled and it carries no document.

And the honest headline. Everything in your book is owner provided and not manufacturer verified, and it says so on the page. That framing is not a weakness to be hidden; it is what makes the rest of the book credible.

The one check we can actually make

We cannot verify a receipt, and we do not claim to — we have not seen the car, spoken to the garage, or checked the work. There is one thing we can test, and it happens to be the thing that matters most to a buyer.

Every mileage you add is compared against your vehicle’s DVSA MOT odometer readings. Those readings are public, they were recorded by a tester rather than by you, and they cannot be edited. If a claimed reading does not fit between them, the record says so plainly rather than sitting there looking tidy.

Be clear about the limits of that: it constrains the mileage figure only. The date, the garage and the work described are unchecked, and a well-made forgery with a plausible mileage would pass. It is one honest check, not a guarantee.

Your documents stay private

A garage invoice usually carries your name and your home address. So the documents you upload are stored privately and are never shown on your report, never included in the PDF you hand a buyer, and never visible to anyone you share the report with. Only you can open them.

What a buyer sees is the record and a note that a document is on file. That is a real trade — they cannot inspect the paperwork themselves — and it is the right one, because the alternative publishes your address to everyone who opens your report.

Lost your service book?

You can buy a replacement service book from most manufacturers, and it is worth knowing exactly what turns up: an empty booklet. The history was never in the book itself, it was in the entries, and a fresh set of blank pages restores none of it. A suspiciously pristine book on a ten-year-old car makes buyers more nervous, not less.

Rebuilding is slower and it actually works. Start with the invoices you still have, then go back to the garages that did the work — businesses keep invoice records for six years for tax purposes, so a garage can often reprint something from years ago if you ask. Whatever you recover has to end up somewhere, and a digital book is a better destination than another paper folder.