The shift handoff checklist: a copy-ready template for delivery fleets

No preamble — here's the checklist. The reasoning is below it, and every rule links to the post that earns it.

The checklist

Start of shift — under 60 seconds:

End of shift — same discipline:

Print it, laminate it, hang it at the key board. Or run it digitally — more on that below.

The rules that make it work

The checklist itself is ordinary. The rules around it are what produce results:

1. Under 60 seconds, measured. A handoff that takes more than a minute will be skipped on the first cold morning, and a skipped inspection teaches the team the rule is optional. The 60-second ceiling is behavioural, not aspirational — the claims math depends on it.
2. Blocking, not advisory. A driver shouldn't be able to close a shift with five photos. Every "warn but allow" workflow converges on warnings being ignored.
3. Same six angles, every time. Day-over-day comparison only works when today's photo frames the same panels as yesterday's.
4. Both ends of the shift. Start-only photos prove what you received, not what you returned. Claims live in that gap — the four inspection moments explain why handover is where damage hides.
5. Reviewed within 24 hours. Every handoff gets one of three outcomes: OK, suspicious, damage. A photo nobody looks at is storage, not evidence.

Paper vs WhatsApp vs app

Three ways fleets run this, and how each fails:

• Paper sheets. Boxes get ticked "OK" regardless of vehicle state; sheets get lost weekly; nothing is searchable when a claim arrives six weeks later.
• WhatsApp group. Works for a month. Then photos become unsearchable, drivers drift, and you can't prove what was sent when — which is the entire point of evidence.
• A generic inspection app. Most take 3–4 minutes per check. See rule #1: anything over a minute dies in winter.

The format matters less than the failure mode: if the checklist can be skipped, fudged, or lost, it eventually will be.

Adapting it to your fleet

• Rental or leased vans: add fuel level and cabin cleanliness emphasis at end-of-shift — that's what return assessments bill you for.
• Multi-driver vehicles: the end-of-shift photo set doubles as the next driver's baseline. The handover is the inspection.
• Winter: wipe snow off panels before photographing. Photos of snow-covered vans are weak evidence — the panel under the snow is what matters.

One honest note on running this in Fleet Go: the in-app photo set is fixed at the six mandatory angles — drivers can't add or swap angles in the app. The adaptations above live in the surrounding process (and on the printable version), not in configuring the photo flow. We consider the fixed set a feature: it's what keeps the handoff under 60 seconds.

Running it digitally

If you'd rather not police laminated sheets, this exact checklist is the default shift flow in Fleet Go: six blocking photos, time-stamped and geo-tagged, auto-compared day-over-day, with the dispatcher review queue built in. Drivers install it in 90 seconds; the first 14 days are free, no card.

Related reading on the Fleet journal:

• How photo evidence at handoff cuts claim disputes by 64%
• Why regular vehicle inspections quietly save Amazon DSPs thousands
• Onboarding a new DSP route: the first 30 days, in order