Most tachograph infringements start in the first five minutes of the day.
Not on the motorway. Not at the weighbridge. Before you leave the yard.
I've seen it on my own card and I've seen it on other drivers' printouts at roadside checks. A blank period before the first driving entry. The wrong mode from the start. A manual entry prompt skipped because the driver was in a hurry. These are the infringements that show up as low-effort wins for DVSA enforcement — easy to spot in the data, straightforward to cite.
None of them require complex hours calculations to identify. They're right there at the start of the record, obvious to anyone reading the printout.
Insert the card — then look at what it says
Obvious, but bear with me. Put your card in slot 1. The tachograph will read the card, display your name and the last activity recorded on it. Wait for it to settle. Don't just insert and start the engine.
What you're looking for: that the card has been accepted. If you get an error — card expired, card not accepted, card from another driver — stop and deal with it. Do not start driving on a card the tachograph is flagging as a problem.
Under Article 34(1) of EU 561/2006, a driver must be able to produce the tachograph records for the current day and the previous twenty-eight calendar days. If your card isn't working, or you've picked up the wrong card, you don't have valid records. That's not a minor issue at a roadside check.
Manual entries — the step most drivers skip
When the card is inserted after a period where it wasn't in a tachograph, the unit will often prompt you to account for the time since the card was last removed. This is the manual entry prompt. It might ask you what activity you were on in the period since you ejected the card.
You need to account for that time honestly. If you were resting — in a hotel, at home, in your bunk — log it as rest. If you were working at the depot before insertion — loading, pre-trip checks, admin — log it as other work. If you were driving another vehicle without a digital tachograph, that needs recording too.
Skipping the prompt — pressing through it without making entries — leaves a blank period in the record. A blank period during a time when the vehicle was potentially on the road shows up in analysis as an unexplained gap. That's one of the first things tachograph analysis software flags. DVSA refer to it as a 'card not in vehicle' period, and if driving is evident from the vehicle unit during that window, you've got a problem.
Article 34(3) of EU 561/2006 requires a driver to enter country and activity information manually when returning to the vehicle after periods where the card was removed. This isn't advisory. It's a legal obligation. Drivers who treat the manual entry prompt as an inconvenience to dismiss are generating infringement records every time.
Country symbols at the start and end of the day
At the start of the working day, the tachograph will ask you to confirm the country you're starting in. At the end of the day, or when you eject the card, it records the country you're ending in.
For UK domestic driving, this is a thirty-second process. You confirm Great Britain. You eject at the end of the day and confirm Great Britain again. Doesn't feel like a significant step.
For international drivers, it's critical. The country records are what allow enforcement agencies to identify which country's rules applied at which point in the journey. Getting it wrong — or skipping it — creates ambiguity in the record that can lead to scrutiny at borders.
Even for domestic UK work, get into the habit of confirming the country properly at start and end of shift. The habit takes thirty seconds to build and prevents a specific class of tachograph record error that's entirely avoidable.
Set the mode before you move
The tachograph defaults to 'drive' mode when the vehicle moves. But before the vehicle moves, the mode you're on reflects whatever was selected when you inserted the card or last changed it.
If you do a walkaround check, complete vehicle inspection paperwork, and then get in the cab and drive off without thinking about mode — the pre-drive activities you logged as 'other work' on the tachograph have correctly been recorded. But if you inserted the card and it defaulted to rest, and you then spent twenty minutes doing an inspection without switching to other work, that twenty minutes is recorded as rest when it was actually work. A minor error, but a record error nonetheless.
Set the mode correctly when you start each activity phase. Pre-trip: other work. Waiting for a bay: availability or other work, depending on your circumstances. Driving: drive (this sets automatically when the vehicle moves). Stopped at a bay doing loading: other work or availability. Rest: rest.
This sounds pedantic and in isolation any single mode error is low-risk. But a pattern of mode errors over a downloaded period is exactly what analysis software looks for. A week of records where work periods show as rest, or availability periods show as other work, creates an inaccurate picture of working time and driving time — one that can produce false infringement calculations or mask real ones.
The printout at the start of shift — when do you need one?
If the tachograph has been running without your card — recording the vehicle unit's activity but not attributed to a driver — you should take a printout from the vehicle unit at the start of your shift to account for that period. This is the 'start of day printout' that Article 35 of Regulation (EU) 165/2014 covers.
It's most relevant when you collect a vehicle that's been running without a driver card inserted — someone moved it in the yard, or it came out of a maintenance run, or it's been sitting with the engine running for pre-heating. The vehicle unit records activity in unknown driver mode. You account for it with a printout at the start of your shift.
You sign and date the printout. Keep it with your records for the shift. At a roadside check, if there's an unknown driver period on the vehicle unit, the printout is your explanation of it. Without it, DVSA's question is: who was driving during that period, and why is there no card data?
Check the previous 28 days on the card
You're required to carry records for the current day and the previous twenty-eight calendar days. The card usually holds around four weeks of activity — the exact figure is about twenty-eight days of driver activity, which for most drivers means close to four weeks. But if you've had periods of illness, leave, or other work away from the vehicle, those periods need to be accounted for either on the card or through manual entries and other documentation.
If you had a fortnight off on annual leave, there's a blank period on the card. DVSA at a roadside check will see that blank period. You need to be able to explain it — either through a manual entry at the start of the return shift covering the leave period, or through documentation your operator holds. A blank fortnight on the card without explanation is flagged as an unknown period.
I covered the manual entry procedure for annual leave and sick leave in a previous post on this site. The pre-drive routine for a return-to-work shift after leave needs the same discipline as any other start-of-day check, but with the additional manual entry covering the gap.
It doesn't take long. It just has to become a habit.
Card in. Card accepted — confirm. Manual entries for the period since last ejection. Country confirmed. Mode set correctly for first activity. Printout taken if vehicle has been running without a card.
The whole process is two minutes on a normal day. Four or five minutes on a return-to-work day with manual entries to complete. That's the difference between clean records and a flagged infringement at a roadside check or in a premises inspection analysis.
I got the start-of-day routine wrong for the first eighteen months of my HGV career. Skipped manual entry prompts, didn't always confirm country properly, started driving in whatever mode the tachograph had last settled on. None of it was intentional, and none of the records were disastrously wrong — but they were slightly wrong, consistently, in ways that a careful analysis would have found.
A TM I worked with at Stafford spent twenty minutes walking me through it properly. Two minutes a day ever since.
If you want your EU 561 and tachograph compliance tracked automatically without relying on memory, ShiftOwt handles it in real time — £5.99/mo for drivers, agency pricing on request.