Four questions every morning — and one screen that answers them

Without this

The morning starts with a notebook, four WhatsApp threads, and a call to whoever locked up last night. And a car that missed its return time is discovered only when the next customer arrives to collect it — so you stand in front of a customer with no car, apologising for something you could have known yesterday had you looked in the right place.

What the board knows

• "Today" on the counter’s clock, not the server’s — there is no timezone column in the system and none is needed
• How many hours late, on every row — not merely a red mark
• The customer’s name and number, and the pickup and return locations, on the same card
• The server detects lateness even with every screen closed — which is the whole value of the alert: the evening, the day off
• One alert per late booking, not every hour all night — anyone woken four times for one car turns notifications off
• An hour’s grace first: twenty minutes behind traffic is not an incident, and alerting on it teaches the dealer to ignore the next one
• And that grace is not a billing grace: what a late return costs comes from that booking’s own terms, never from our notification tuning
• Extending a booking re-arms the alert — a booking that was extended and then runs late again alerts again
• Cars that are off the road are marked, so a car sitting in the workshop is never handed over by mistake
• Everything recorded here enters the vehicle event history written by the database, not by the application