Just a friendly bit of advice to the newbie drivers.
I’ve never bothered with manual entries. I didn’t see the point. And to be totally honest I’ve never been picked up on it - even when pulled by DVSA.
However, very recently I had an assessment with Tesco’s. They take your card and scan it before the assessment. So I couldn’t claim to never have done any driving. One of the first things the assessor asked me to do was a manual entry… Long story short he had to walk me through it (I’d have done it but it was obvious I wasn’t comfortable) - and frankly I looked like a fool.
Now I didn’t fail the assessment for that. But he did give me the feedback that the sort of drivers they are after don’t ignore with stuff like that. I actually failed because of other sloppy habits I’ve got into. It’s easy to think you are a top-notch driver because you get from a to b without crashing. The reality is that decent firms don’t want guys who have one hand on the steering wheel and who don’t really mind the artic isn’t perfectly straight because it’s ‘on the bay’.
Some will say all the things I mentioned don’t matter - but if you want to get a job/access to those sort of jobs I’d start doing those things. From now on I’ll be doing them. The big players and payers expect it so if I were you guys I’d just do it. As always this is just my opinion and feel free to ignore it.