Provenance: the certificate, the record and the search

A vehicle's history is three separate things that are often spoken of as one: who has owned it, what has been done to it, and who has a claim on it. They come from different documents, they fail in different ways, and only the third can be searched rather than read.

Doc 01 Registration certificate

The V5C, and the slip that comes off it

The certificate is not a title document and it does not prove ownership. It records a keeper, which is a different claim, and that distinction is the reason the finance search exists at all. What the certificate is good for is agreement: every field on it either matches the vehicle in front of it or does not.

The new-keeper slip is detached and handed over at the point of sale, and the rest of the certificate goes back for the change of keeper. A certificate presented without its slip already attached is a question, not a problem — but it is a question that gets written down before the vehicle is accepted.

Read on the certificate: Identification number, engine number, colour, date of first registration, count of former keepers, keeper's name and address, and the document's own serial number.
Compared against: The number stamped in the shell, the number on the plate, and the test record.
Written as a question: A recent change of colour, a keeper count that does not sit with the age, a certificate whose serial number falls inside a reported block.

Doc 02 Service record

A stamp is an assertion; an invoice is evidence

A stamp in a book names a garage and sometimes a date. An invoice names the garage, the date, the odometer reading at the time, the parts fitted and the labour charged. The second can be checked against the vehicle; the first can only be believed. Both are recorded, and they are recorded as different things.

Mileage continuity is read across the test record in date order. Every reading should be higher than the one before it. A reading lower than its predecessor is a discontinuity and is written as a discontinuity, which is a statement about the record and not an accusation about the vehicle. A long run with no test is a gap, and a gap is not the same as a clean record — the two look identical in a summary and are not identical at all.

What gets written when there is nothing

No stamps, no invoices and no test history is a condition in its own right and is written as none held. It is not written as unknown, because unknown implies a search that has not been done.

Doc 03 The search

Outstanding finance and write-off markers

The search is run against the identification number and the registration together, never against the registration alone. A registration can be moved from one vehicle to another; a number stamped into a shell cannot. A search returning clean on the registration and an entry on the number is exactly the case the double search is for.

Where a write-off marker appears, what is recorded is the marker and its date. What is not recorded is an opinion about the quality of the repair, because that opinion would be ours and the marker is not. A Category S or Category N entry does not end a sale by itself; an undeclared one does.

Held until answered

An unsettled finance entry is held, in writing, with the seller. The vehicle is not prepared, not photographed for sale and not offered while the entry stands.

This company arranges none

No finance of any kind is arranged, offered or introduced here. The only finance this page is about is finance a third party registered against a vehicle before it reached us.

Note Short trails

A short trail is recorded as short, not as clean

A vehicle first registered outside the United Kingdom has a shorter domestic paper trail than one registered here from new, and the shortness is a property of the trail rather than of the vehicle. The same is true of a vehicle that has spent years off the road: there is less to read, so less has been checked.

The sheet says which. Where the trail begins part-way through a vehicle's life, the sheet gives the date it begins and states plainly that nothing before that date has been seen. That sentence is the whole point of this band, and it is the sentence a photograph cannot carry.