Running a business fleet is all about marginal changes to make your operation as efficient as possible. Where you can, you’ll be cutting costs and planning routes with multiple stop-offs so that your drivers are working at their optimal rate. Yet there’s always more that you can do to track and manage your finances. This article will look at the business fleet fuel card – what it is, how you can use it to track your expenditure, and what to do with the resultant data in order to further hone your operational efficiency.
Fuel Cards
A fuel card is a card, just like a debit card or a credit card, which your drivers can use to purchase fuel. Using a fuel card instead of a more general payment card has a host of benefits, not least encouraging your drivers to track every cent that they spend when they’re out on the road and refueling for trips.
Equipping all of your drivers with a fuel card means that you have all of your business expenses in one place, which is convenient when it comes to number crunching and understanding where your money’s going at the end of every month. With the price of gas constantly fluctuating, fuel cards also allow you to track this spending and adjust your prices accordingly when the price of fuel rises.
Benefits Of A Fuel Card
There are several benefits to using a fuel card for your business fleet. As mentioned above, it gives you an all-in-one channel to track your business expenses. The best gas cards for business owners to give out to their drivers also offer you exclusive deals and discounts on fuel so that you’re paying less for one of the most fundamental charges that you encounter as a business.
Fuel cards are accepted everywhere and do away with the need to ask your drivers to keep receipts. With no paper trail needed, you’ll save administrative time while also controlling what your drivers spend, accounting for every penny that they use on the road. Most excitingly of all, a fuel card means you can track your spending data, both in real-time and as a forecast, so that you can hone your operational efficiency.
Tracking Data
With a fuel card in the pocket of every driver, you’ll have unprecedented real-time access to your daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly spending. This is incredibly useful for firms that are constantly having to change their pricing structure to accommodate changes in the market price of gas and other business essentials.
This data also means that you’ll be able to track the cost of transporting goods to different locations. This will help you understand where your most profitable routes are, which routes it might be best to abandon, and which of your drivers is best at keeping fuel use low. All of these insights will help you make your business as efficient as possible in the months and years ahead.
Businesses with fuel cards for their fleets have unprecedented access to their spending data, helping them monitor and track spending while also drawing valuable insights on efficiency changes they could make in the future.
