HIDE & SEEK · every vehicle accounted for

When a vehicle is repossessed and brought to a recovery lot, the thing that matters is a clean chain of custody: who brought it in, when it moved, who released it, and what happened in between. Run on paper and memory, that trail develops gaps, and in a recovery operation gaps are legal and financial exposure.

The brief was to make every vehicle's movement on the lot a recorded, accountable event.

• QR-driven check-in and check-out. Each vehicle carries a code; an agent scans it to move it in or out, and every scan writes to that vehicle's record. The scan is the paperwork.
• One timeline per vehicle. Acquisition, check-ins, check-outs, and status changes all land on a single per-vehicle history, so a car's whole custody trail is one record instead of scattered notes.
• Two surfaces, one source of truth. A React Native app for agents working the lot and a web admin panel for oversight, both reading and writing the same backend with roles kept separate.

The scan is the event, not a form. Agents standing in a yard will not fill out forms reliably. Making the QR scan itself the check-in action is what made the data trustworthy, because the easy path and the correct path became the same path.

History adds, it never overwrites. A custody trail you can quietly edit is not a custody trail. Every action appends to the record, so the timeline stays a source of truth rather than a draft.

Split the field app from the oversight app. Agents need speed and one job; admins need the whole picture. Keeping the two surfaces separate kept each one honest to the person using it.

Published on Google Play and used by a real recovery operation to track vehicles on the lot. It taught me to design for the person standing in a yard with a phone, where the correct action has to be the fastest one available or it simply will not happen.