Build a DIY Vehicle Maintenance Tracker Tutorial in SmartSuite

By day, I help organizations use no code tools like SmartSuite, the sponsor of today's video, to organize their operations. But by night, I'm facing a little bit of a process challenge of my own. This season I have gone really headfirst into the world of learning how to ride an adv dual sport motorcycle. That means learning how to ride, but also more importantly and something I didn't quite appreciate, learning how to maintain this new vehicle that is know a whole new world to me. To date, the way I have maintained my vehicle after many, many drops is just taking it into my little shed, flipping through many pages of maintenance information and haphazardly trying to fix the stuff that broke. Because either I didn't properly maintain it, the previous owner didn't properly maintain it, or, you know, I just dropped my bike one too many times. While to date this approach has worked okay, it's allowed me to get my bike up and running each time after I have crashed it doing something dumb. I would like to take a little bit more of a ser serious approach as I'm going into this next phase and make sure that both my vehicle and myself are set up for a safe and successful journey by making motorcycle maintenance, vehicle maintenance in general, easier for me to keep track of. The fact is, my current approach to maintenance is pretty, pretty reactive. Yeah, I'll do some basic chain stuff and things that I know I need to do every time that kind of jump out at me. But when it comes to all of the periodic maintenance you're actually supposed to supposed to do on my bike or any kind of vehicle you might have, let's just say my goldfish memory isn't quite equipped to keep track of all the things I need to do at 7,000 miles. It just doesn't work. And so I find myself doing my maintenance reactively or after something breaks, or if I happen to hear a weird clicking sound that I have to then go diagnose via a forum that, hey, it has to do with my chain not being properly maintained. I mean, these kinds of reactive ways of operating are exactly what my day job here is about helping people avoid. But when it came to my personal life of maintaining the vehicles in my orbit, I kind of didn't practice what I preached. So I needed to change things up. I started off by creating a spreadsheet like this one here, where I started logging the service intervals and the miles on the bike and when I checked what. But there was a problem with this, even though, you know, it's a nice little spreadsheet it has some good lookups to help me keep track of what needed to be maintained when I consistently forgot to actually check it. Let's just call it what it is. So in this video, what I want to share is how I've kind of taken things up a notch by using a software called SmartSuite on the free plan and building something kind of like this spreadsheet, but on steroids. This template that you see on the screen here is my DIY Motorcycle Maintenance Tracker, or really Vehicle Maintenance Tracker. Whether you're tracking things for a motorcycle, a scooter, a boat or a car, this tracks things the same way. Essentially what I've done here is taken the periodic maintenance so service intervals that is found inside the Yamaha service manual here that we use. And I've put them inside this tool called SmartSuite, much like the spreadsheet I used previously. This allows me to take all of the information I need to keep track of and put it at the ready. But I've taken it a few steps further inside the template I have here, and I've actually built in systems for logging when I actually maintain certain things, and for having the system yell at me when things become overdue or when I stick skip a piece of maintenance that I should have done during a period of time. Step two of building out this vehicle maintenance tracker for me was just setting up the solution and the apps inside it to do that. I signed up for SmartSuite using the affiliate link below, and I went into my workspace, which is just on the free plan of SmartSuite and I created a new solution from scratch. I named it Vehicle Maintenance Tracker. And I've added three different apps, three different databases or categories of information that I need to track. The three types of information I've chosen to put into my DIY Vehicle Maintenance Tracker is Vehicles Maintenance Schedule and Maintenance Log. Now these are all kind of filled with some dummy data. Right now they're not fully filled out, but each of these databases allows me to track a type of information I need to know in order to say, hey, is my bike safe to be ridden or is it in need of some serious repairs or maintenance, whatever the situation is. Oh, but before we kind of dive into this, I do want to warn you that this is a pretty complicated advanced build out. I built this for myself to make my life so much easier around tracking my motorcycle and Alex's motorcycles maintenance, but it's definitely not like beginner level SmartSuite build out. SmartSuite has so much power and I really Wanted to push it in this video. So if you're someone who's just getting started, please understand some of the build out stuff I'm going to be going through I'll be going through rather quickly, but it will make sense as you learn more about the tool later on. We can help you with that with our course in the description below, but just want to warn you before you get overwhelmed, there are timestamps to jump around. Please leave comments if you have questions. And with that, let me show you around the actual apps themselves. So inside each of these three apps I have a ton of fields going on and they're all kind of interconnected. But we're going to start off with the garage here. Meet Fang, my little baby, my little baby girl here, my Yamaha WR250R. And I've got three sections right off the bat inside this vehicle's app that help me organize information around the bike itself. The very top one is a vehicle name field. This is generated based on some of the fields that I'm going to show you here in a second. Auto generated is SmartSuite's super convenient way of saying, hey, rather than me having to manually name this thing, I'm going to have the name based on fields I fill out elsewhere. So it's automatically created for me and written for me. Super helpful for things like YouTube videos and any production work. But in this case it's also a real time saver. Next up I'm going to go into the detail space and this is where I've got information around the bike itself itself. I've got the nickname, who's the owner, make and model, mileage, purchase date, status of whether it's a dream bike or we actually own it, and then a photo because it's fun. Do we need that? Absolutely not. But these are the things that I think add a little bit of personality to the SmartSuite account and makes it a little bit more enjoyable to look at. All of these fields are static fields for the most part, except for mileage. Mileage is actually a formula of something I'm going to show you here in a moment where it's actually summing up the mileage log that I have connected to this. I'll show you that in a moment of how that's all calculated, but just take my word for it for now. Below these fields we have the mods subitem field. Subitems in SmartSuite are kind of like what you see as subtasks inside of other tools. It is essentially a record Inside a record. It's very meta. So this thing here, you know how it has fields and stuff we're tracking for our vehicle? Well, we can build these little sub items, these sub directories inside, to track other sorts of information, such as in this case, the mods for the bike. So if there's any aftermarket parts I have and I want to track when I bought it, how much it cost, what's its condition, anything I want to track I can put here. I really wanted to add this field into this account so I could organize these items because my bike is a used bike. And so when it comes to what modifications were made to it, I don't always know. And sometimes I'm taking things apart to work on something else and I discover an aftermarket park that I didn't know was there. Because I will probably end up selling this bike at some point, it's great for me to have a list of all the modifications and how old they are and so on here so I don't have to just memorize it. I know for this and for all of the things related to this DIY maintenance tracker, you know, there are people out there that do not need this because y' all are so good and you just eat, sleep and breathe vehicles and can remember what aftermarket bash plate you have on. I am not that person. I have a goldfish memory. This is a second language to me. And so anything I can keep track of, maybe with photos or dates or whatever, is going to help me so much later on so I don't have to try to piece together in five years when I sell this bike. You know, what did we do to it? I. I don't want to try to memorize that after the mods subitem field, I've got a maintenance overview field and here's where we start getting into some of the linking stuff. These three fields up at the top are all count fields. Essentially they are counting based on the kind of maintenance area we have down here. So let me go over the maintenance area first and we'll come back up to the count fields. So in this maintenance area, the next biggie is this linked record to the maintenance of log over. In another app, I have logged all of the maintenance I have done and I've connected it to the bike here. This is showing me what I've worked on and at what mileage did I work on it. Below this log of maintenance, which we'll learn more about when we go over into that app, we have the Service Intervals app. This is where we've connected the bike Here fang to the suggested service intervals from the service manual to tell me what I should be maintaining and when in this demo area. I've only added three different service areas into this, but ideally we want to add all 37 or however many it is inside the suggested service manual. Of course, if you're someone who skips maintenance or doesn't care about certain areas, you could delete those. Or if you are an overachiever who likes to do certain things all the time, like you want to wax and polish your dirt bike for some reason every single hundred miles you could add that in here. But that's what this connection is. It's connecting over to the service intervals and app where we can track what we want to maintain for this given bike. These things are then summed up in these count fields that are tracking. For example, this one here of the record to service intervals. How many of them have a miles to next service of greater than 100, meaning we're not coming due anytime soon for that service. We have done it. We're good for a while. It'll show up as green as an on track maintenance item. These are all count fields based on that relationship that I already showed you. This mileage log is exactly what it sounds like. It just tracks the trips and the starting and ending odometer. This is manually tracked at this point and I can add it in using some different fields or just open up the SmartSuite mobile app and log it on the go. This vehicle's area I have formatted as a card view as opposed to like a grid or a spreadsheet just because I think the cards look prettier. And I have gone ahead and added some fancy fields in here such as showing the photo as the COVID image to kind of show me what I'm looking at and have some visibility into the fields right here so I can see the mileage just at a glance. I also have a spotlight conditional formatting shout out basically on this view saying, hey, if there is overdue maintenance for a vehicle, please make it red. And that's why you see that red bar up at the top, it's kind of shouting out to me that hey, there is overdue maintenance for this vehicle. When I add in our other vehicles that we have here, this would be a nice way for me to see, you know, which vehicles need to go in for a shop night. Moving beyond the vehicles area, we have the maintenance schedule area and this one is more straightforward. Essentially all I've done here is take things from my Yamaha service manual and input them into SmartSuite. This is the part of anything in here that I am most excited about, because this means I can use the SmartSuite mobile app on my phone in the backyard and just pull up the thing I'm supposed to be checking for and quickly have the instructions I need to actually perform that maintenance for. For example, I have no idea what exactly I'm supposed to be doing when it comes to maintaining my fuel line. I've never done it. I probably should. But let's find out. Inside this particular area, I have the maintenance item once again, dynamically generating that name based on the fields that are in here, the name of the item I'm servicing, the vehicle I'm servicing, and then some formulas that are calculating when I have serviced that piece. So let me just show you what these formulas look like for the geeks out there. We're looking at the maintenance log here. And up here we're doing some math based on the suggested service intervals and when we've last serviced it. Pause this video here. If you want to geek out about the formulas and double check my math, I'd appreciate that. But let me show you kind of the details first. Inside this first area of instructions, I have actually copy and pasted screenshots of the Yamaha service manual right here. So when I am on my phone, like I said in the backyard, I can just pull it up and see. Okay, here's what I'm supposed to be doing. For example, right here, I can see that I'm supposed to check the fuel hose for cracks. Okay, that's not terrible. And I've got this image here that I can make full screen to show me exactly what those instructions are for my device. I like that. Seeing this on the mobile app, I can really zoom in and focus in on the certain area I need to maintain. And there I go. I've got the instructions I can just collapse and the overview information right here, all inside this instructions section in one Smart Doc field. That was a lot of words right there. But essentially I copy and pasted the relevant areas of the service manual so I don't have to find them and flip through all the pages later on. Below this instructions area, I have a when to service area. This section has information about the service schedule that is defined inside my maintenance guide. Going back into the Google Doc here, you can see what this looks like in the original file. It says things like fuel line 4,000, 7,000, 10,000. And this is great if you just remember to check this manual at 10,000 miles. But I don't. And so that's why I like this kind of approach. Instead, I've put the same numbers in here. 4,000, 7,000, 10,000 for service interval 1, 2 and 3. But now because I've put it into SmartSuite as opposed to just a PDF I forget to look at, SmartSuite can yell at me based on when I need to do service. So here we can see we've got all the service intervals up through 10 here. So I've continued it to 31,000 miles. Let's hope my bike lasts that long. And up at the very top I have a formula field called Next Service which you saw referenced in previous formulas. For those of you who are geeky enough to notice that this is where things get a little janky. Because there is not currently a filter function in SmartSuite, I have got a bunch of nested if functions to jangly make this happen. I am going to just briefly put this into human speak and share what this formula is doing. But please know that this is not the most elegant way to do this formula in a spreadsheet. You can just use the filter function super easy. But because of all the convenience that SmartSuite brings of having it yell at me and send me alerts for when things are due, this is worth it to me. Right now it's telling me I need to next service this particular item at 4,000 miles. That's because according to the maintenance logs, the last field we have here that's connecting when I last serviced it. This is telling me I last serviced it at 2,100 miles, give or take. If this was different, let's just say I actually service this at 4,500 miles. I serviced it, then saved that work, updated that here, make sure everything saves and works correctly. Now you'll notice some of the fields automatically changed. It says it was Last serviced at 4,500 miles. I've got 3,500 miles till I need to service it again. And that's all based on this thing right here because now I've passed the 4,000 mark and I've taken care of that. So now my next service is at 7,000 miles. It's doing that math for me based on when the last maintenance was done. That maintenance is determined by this final field linking it to the maintenance logs. It's not like it's hard, it's just a little bit complex to wrap your head around. But when you play with it a little bit, it really does click together and makes my life a lot easier. So I'm going to save that here and I'm going to show you the last area which is the maintenance log. This is where, you know, other things are feeding together. Essentially this is where I'm logging when I am doing work on the bike. So let me just show you one of the example ones that I just opened previously. These maintenance logs have an entry title once again calculated thanks to a dynamic formula showing the date of service at odometer readings has the date of service here, the status odometer reading, which vehicle it was worked on, who did the work and the items serviced. One cool thing I will highlight here is that these are linked record fields. But for the extra geeky, I want to show you one little special feature we have set up inside this under modify field settings that you can see that there's actually a filter set up to only show me the maintenance items that are connected already to my vehicle that I've selected in the last step. So if I had multiple vehicles in my virtual garage, this dropdown right here would only show me things that are connected to my vehicle, not the other vehicles I have added into it. It's a little setting, but one of those things that makes SmartSuite's linked record feels ultra powerful. That's this top section. Below this I have details where I can track notes about the service interval and any photos I want to have for what I did. But really the most important information is not the photos and the notes, which I might generally always keep blank. It's this piece of what items were service and at what odometer reading. This feeds into everything else I've shown you. It all kind of builds together. Okay, so if I save this here, if I go over to this maintenance schedule now and open up that spark plug that we just mentioned in the last one, we can see it was last serviced at 3500 because it's all connected together and it's next needs to be serviced at 7,000. And all of this connects over to the vehicles area. If I go inside of the FAANG area, look at the maintenance overview, I can see what service intervals these are and where we're at. Such as right here, the spark plugs are good to go. But that spark arrestor, oh my gosh, it's overdue. I should have done that in the last service and I forgot. You'll also see in this area, I have service logs that haven't yet happened included in this. This is a way that I can Keep track of maintenance that needs to be done based on a certain time of year as opposed to based on the odometer reading. So, for example, I know I want to do a fall tune up of everything I can create that little row right here of my September service, assign it to me, give it a date, and have it repeat every three months to let me change things for the season. This is me using the new repeating due dates feature, the repeating task feature inside of SmartSuite. Right here, I have this set up to repeat every three months and automatically remind me to do maintenance every three months regardless of the service interval, regardless if I forget to log miles, right? Regardless if I ride the bike at all, I want to at least be maintaining this bike every three months. And that's because in our service manual, it even says even if we don't get more mileage, we want to be maintaining this bike every six months. Understanding that I'll be putting miles on it and time will be passing, I've set my recurrence to be every three months. So every three months, this little magical setup here is going to yell at me. It's going to send me an alert based on my settings inside of SmartSuite, and I'm going to see it up at the very top saying, hey, Layla, it's time for your motorcycle maintenance. And when this date arrives, I can easily go into my vehicle right here and see, okay, what maintenance needs to be done. I can see that there's nothing that's at risk, but there's one overdue. Okay, Know what my shop night's going to be tonight? It's going to be figuring out whatever the heck's overdue. Oh, the Spark arrestor. I need to go check the Spark arrestor and make sure everything's working right there to make maintenance even easier to log. Because sometimes it's just opening up your device might be a little bit time consuming. I've also created a quick form here that I can easily add information into. It looks something like this, and it feeds into creating a new entry. But rather than having to access it through SmartSuite, I can actually have it open in another tab. Fill in any of the fields I need to add add notes or photos using this beautiful form. Click log and it'll automatically add into my maintenance log right here without me even needing to go into SmartSuite. All I need is the URL to this form and I'm able to log submissions of maintenance to on the go. Just one more way to make this even easier to actually Keep updated. Prefer not to see the interface of what I just showed you of going inside the vehicle to see what I need to maintain. Well, there's also a second option. Inside my maintenance schedule I've set up some spotlights that tell me with colors what I need to pay attention to. Again, based on that miles to next service, it'll tell me green, yellow, red, what needs my attention, all grouped by the vehicle I have it under. So if I had multiple vehicles here, I could collapse and focus in on just what I'm willing to work on during that work session and try to get everything to be that green part. Whether you're a visual color based person like me who likes to see it like this, or if you prefer the more condensed look of what I have built into this here, it's all showing you the same thing of a quick at a glance report of the condition of your motorcycle. And all of this is possible thanks to SmartSuite's Spotlight features, their grouping features, linked record features, and I think more than anything else, they're ridiculously powerful formulas that allow us to calculate based on the fields that we have to spit out these reports dynamically of what's the next thing you need to do. So that's how I track my vehicle maintenance for my motorcycle inside this DIY vehicle maintenance tracker directly inside SmartSuite. So it can yell at me and alert me and email me when things need to be maintained so I don't just have to remember to go check some cluttered PDF of a service manual. I can actually be proactive about the maintenance of my vehicle. If you are someone who has a vehicle that matters to you, maybe it's your car, maybe your motorcycle, your side by side, maybe it's your fleet of vehicles for your trucking company. If you have vehicles in your world that require consistent maintenance to keep you and the drivers safe, maybe building out a system like this might be a great investment of your afternoon today. If you want to get started for yourself, just use our affiliate link below to Sign up for SmartSuite for free and follow along with what I've just discussed in this video. Costs you nothing and supports this channel at the same time. SmartSuite is a sponsor of this channel that allows us to produce videos like this for free for all of you. So please do use that link to Support us and SmartSuite at the same time at no cost to you. If you'd like to learn more about using SmartSuite, please do check out our training course linked in the description below where we'll show you how to use SmartSuite for more than just vehicle maintenance, but also for life and house and work tasks as well. Not quite sure yet. If you want to learn even more, be sure to check out this video I linked at the end screen here where you can learn more about my favorite SmartSuite feature and one that you can plug right in to this vehicle maintenance tracker. Until next time, enjoy the process.