Setting truck capacity
Record each truck's capacity in cubic metres — and what VanMan does and doesn't do with it.
Each truck can carry a Capacity (m³) figure. It is optional.
Setting it
Go to Fleet > Trucks, click the truck, and enter the number in Capacity (m³). Decimals are fine — 24.75 is a perfectly good answer. Click Update Truck.
Use the real figure from the vehicle's specs rather than rounding up.
What VanMan does with it
Nothing, beyond showing it to you.
Capacity is a reference figure, not a constraint. It appears in the Capacity column on the trucks list and nowhere else.
It is not shown when you assign a truck to a job. It does not warn you when a load looks too big. It does not filter, sort, or rank trucks by fit. Nothing in VanMan compares a job's volume against the truck you picked.
The number is there so a human can look it up. That is the entire feature.
So recording capacity is still worth doing — it means your dispatcher can answer "will the Henderson job fit in Missy?" without walking outside. Just do not expect the software to answer it for them.
A name collision worth knowing
You will see "Vehicle capacity" on a job's estimate, and "Vehicle Capacity (trucks)" on an appraisal template. Neither is this field.
Those belong to the appraisal system and are filled in per estimate — and confusingly, the one on the appraisal template is a count of trucks, while the one on the estimate is in m³. A truck's own Capacity (m³) never flows into either.
Tutorial: record your fleet's capacities usefully
Make the numbers earn their place.
Get the real load-space figure for each vehicle from its specs. A number someone guessed is worse than a blank — a blank prompts a question, a wrong number gets trusted.
Fleet > Trucks → click the truck → Capacity (m³) → Update Truck. Repeat across the fleet.
On the trucks list, click the Capacity column header to sort. You now have your fleet ordered smallest to largest — the view you actually want when someone asks what you can put a four-bedroom house in.
This list is the only place the number appears, so this is where the value is.
Now open the job form. The truck chips show name and colour — no capacity. Nothing warns you that you have put a 40 m³ load on a 20 m³ truck.
Booking the right truck is a judgement your dispatcher makes with the list open, not something the form checks.
A job's estimated volume lives on its Appraisal or Costs tab, in the estimate's own fields. Comparing that against a truck's capacity is a manual step you take — read one, read the other, decide.
A placeholder entry for crew-only jobs does not need a capacity. Blank is honest and reads correctly in the list as —.