On a phone you can photograph a vehicle's VIN plate and Manifold will read the characters, look the VIN up, and fill in the vehicle's details for you. It is meant for the car in front of you: no typing seventeen characters into a phone, and it works on plates that have no barcode to scan.
This is different from the Scan button on the Check-In/Out home screen. That one reads a barcode to find an existing work order. Photographing the VIN writes the VIN onto the vehicle, and it reads the printed characters, so it works on older plates, worn plates, and plates with no barcode at all.
**Where to find it**
Open a work order in the Mobile Bay app. If that work order's vehicle has no VIN on file yet, an "Add VIN" button appears in the banner at the top, just under the vehicle name. If the vehicle already has a VIN, the button is not there, because there is nothing to fill in.
**How to capture it**
- Tap "Add VIN". The camera opens with a wide box across the middle of the screen.
- Hold the phone upright and move in until the VIN fills the box. Six to eight inches away is about right. You do not need to turn the phone sideways.
- If the plate is in shadow, tap the flashlight button in the top corner.
- Tap the round shutter button at the bottom.
**Confirming it**
Manifold shows you the photo it read, the characters it found, and the year, make and model that VIN belongs to. Check the characters against the photo. If one is wrong, tap the field and correct it.
Before you can save, you have to tick the box confirming you compared the VIN to the photo. The Save button stays greyed out until you do. If you edit the VIN after ticking it, the tick clears and you confirm again, because the comparison you made no longer applies to what is on the screen.
**What gets filled in**
Along with the VIN itself, Manifold can fill in the year, make, model, trim, engine, body style and door count, using the free vehicle database run by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
- If those fields are empty on the vehicle, the box offering to fill them is ticked for you.
- If the vehicle already says something different, the box is amber and is NOT ticked. It tells you what it would replace, and you decide. Somebody may have typed those details while standing at the car, and a lookup is not automatically more right than they were.
- If the VIN did not look up cleanly, usually meaning a character was misread, the details are shown but never pre-ticked.
**Seeing the rest of the details**
The lookup returns far more than fits on a phone. Open the vehicle from the Customers or Vehicles page and you will find a "Decoded from VIN" section listing everything it knows about that car: body style, doors, fuel type, transmission, engine model, assembly plant, restraint systems and more. On an invoice or a work order, click the vehicle name or the VIN to jump straight to that vehicle. While editing an invoice, the View button next to the vehicle dropdown does the same. On a dealer invoice the car belongs to the dealer's customer rather than to a customer of yours, so the link opens VIN Lookup instead, with that vehicle's full history laid out.
**If it cannot read the plate**
Move closer, wipe the plate, or turn the flashlight on and try again. Badly worn plates sometimes will not read at all, and you can still type the VIN in by hand on the vehicle record.
**Note.** The button only appears on a work order that has a vehicle attached. If a work order has no vehicle on it yet, add the vehicle first and the button will be there.
**Looking up a car with no work order yet**
If you want to check a vehicle before there is a work order for it, for example while talking to a customer in the lot, use the VIN Scan tile on the phone home screen instead. It works with no paperwork at all and shows you the vehicle's history with your shop. See "VIN Scan: look up any vehicle from your phone".