Read driver cards and check the times without the data ever leaving your own computer.
A short note on why we built this. We wanted to understand our own tachograph data ourselves, without always needing somebody else's software for it. The whole thing started out of plain curiosity, and the files are parsed entirely on the basis of the public EU specification.
Two things about the existing programs annoyed us. The first is that they only ever show one file at a time, even though a single .ddd covers just a short period. We simply throw all the downloads together and get the complete month.
The second: when the card was not inserted for a while, some programs invent violations for that time anyway, although there is no data for it at all. In our program it just says, honestly, “not assessable”.
What surprised us ourselves is that in our tests our activity timeline agrees with the big, established programs to over 99%. So the numbers can be taken seriously.
All of it runs locally on your own computer, and nothing gets uploaded or passed on to anyone.
- Driving time
- Working time
- Rest day
- not assessable
A single download only covers part of the month. Many programs never show more than this slice.
Each further download adds a piece, and the files overlap at the edges.
Scernetta lays all downloads over each other and takes, for every day, the file with the most complete data. That is how the whole month comes together, and the strip underneath shows which file each day came from.
On days without a card there is no data. The analysis says “not assessable” there, and no violation is made out of it.
What the program does
You open the .ddd files that your download device or card reader produced, whether they came from a driver card or from the vehicle unit's mass memory. Scernetta works out which driver a file belongs to, lays all of that driver's downloads over each other in date order, and for each day takes the file that holds the most complete data for that day. What you get is one continuous history across all the downloads, the whole month or the whole year if the files go back that far.
From that history the program derives the shifts and adds up driving, work, availability and rest for each day, each week and each two-week period, since the regulation looks at all three. It then checks the times against Regulation (EC) No 561/2006 and Directive 2002/15/EC, or against ARV 1 and ARV 2 for Switzerland, and shows violations in two views side by side. One view assesses the way the established programs do, the other sticks strictly to the wording of the law. Where the two disagree, you can see it in the program and decide for yourself which one to follow.
When the card was not inserted for a period, there is simply no data for that period. Some programs calculate violations for such gaps anyway, which never made sense to us. Scernetta writes “not assessable, card not inserted” at that point and leaves it there, because you cannot derive a violation from nothing.
For the current day the program also works out how much driving time is left and when the next rest is due. At the end you export a report as PDF or CSV, optionally with a source manifest that lists for every day which file the data came from, so that months later you can still trace where a number originated.
All of this happens on your computer, which is what people mean by on-prem. There is no server behind it that anything gets uploaded to, which is also why there is no user account. The files stay in the folder they were in before.
Who we made it for
First of all for hauliers and fleet managers who have to keep their drivers legal and want to hand over reports at an inspection without uploading their card data to somebody else's cloud. Bus and coach operators are just as much in mind, because the same law applies to them even though most programs only think of trucks. And individual drivers who want to read their own card and check their own times can use the program in exactly the same way, since it needs neither an account nor a company behind it.
If you want the analysis inside your own system, say a TMS, an ERP or a telematics platform, the same engine is available as an on-prem API. It runs as a container in your own network, and there is more about it on the API page.
What we can back up
We checked Scernetta against the established software and against the text of the law, because we wanted to know ourselves whether the numbers can be trusted.
| over 99% | agreement of our activity timeline with established software |
|---|---|
| 99.8% | agreement on work shifts |
| 317 of 318 | test cases of the rules engine passed against the statute itself, not just against other programs |
| over 4,600 | real card files processed without errors |
The parser is built entirely from the public EU specification.
If you want to try this with your own files, send us a short message with the number of your drivers and whether you are interested in the desktop program or the API. We will get back to you with a trial version.