Jan
27
How to monitor business vehicle maintenance with a fleet card
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If your company has a fleet of cars and trucks at its disposable, making sure all of those vehicles are running smoothly and are up to standards can be a huge headache, especially if the number of vehicles in the company fleet is large. If you are dealing with a hundred vehicles, it can be cumbersome to maintain accurate logs of when each vehicle last received an oil change, new tires or general tune-up. It can be even more nerve-wracking to keep track of the different expenses associated with maintaining the fleet. But if you switch over to a fleet card for all your vehicle maintenance needs, then keeping track of which vehicles need to be repaired, when they need to be looked at and how much each vehicle is costing will be unbelievably easy.
When you think of a fleet card, you most likely think of discount gas. And while this is one of the main benefits of using a fleet fuel card, there are many other advantages the card offers, especially when it comes to maintaining your fleet. With the use of a fleet card you will be able to better monitor your company’s vehicle maintenance.
Keeping track of money spent on vehicles
If you use a company credit card to maintain your fleet, then your finance department will most likely have to go through a pile of receipts or look over the credit card statement line-by-line in order to figure out exactly what was spent on the vehicles. A fleet fuel card, however, can be configured so that only gas and repair expenses are added to it. This means that at the end of the month you will be better able to balance your books.
Better prices
When you use a fleet card for your company vehicle repairs, quite often you will be able to get the work done at a discounted cost as part of a loyalty program. This means that you will be saving the company money without sacrificing the safety of the company vehicles.
Keep track of vehicle repairs
With the use of fleet cards, you will have different reports available to you, depending on your needs. Not only will you be able to keep track of how much gas is going into each vehicle, but you’ll be able to receive reports on vehicle maintenance, and which cars or trucks are receiving the most repair. If you are dealing with a large number of vehicles, this can be invaluable in helping you know when you may need to retire a certain vehicle.
Vehicle usage trends
Another advantage of the reports associated with the use of your fleet card is that you will be able to figure out vehicle usage trends. If a certain car always seems to need to go in to get its wheels aligned, you will be able to see if this is due to the age of the vehicle, the driver, or a certain route the vehicle constantly travels on. With this information you will be able to decide if the company needs to invest in more vehicles, retrain drivers, or pick alternate driving and trucking routes.
While a lot of this can be done when a company credit card is being used, it would take up valuable time and energy on the part of your financial department. And why would you want your employees to spend hours looking at data when fleet card reporting software can do it for them? With discount gas and top-notch vehicle maintenance, it only makes good business sense to switch to a fleet card for all your fleet needs.
Nov
30
Freezing the Market: Price Protection
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One of the most challenging parts of managing your fleet’s fuel expenses is how difficult it is to predict fuel prices. Although for the most part, the cost per gallon changes very slowly, that is not always the case. Don’t forget about 2008, when fuel prices shot up faster than anyone could have predicted. Suddenly we were paying more than $4 a gallon for fuel. For a fleet manager who is forced to operate his fleet on a tight budget, these kinds of unexpected jumps in fuel prices can be devastating.
What can you do? Luckily, there is something called fuel price protection. This is where you sign an agreement with a company to continue buying fuel at an agreed-upon price, even if the market jumps during your contract period. Most programs will enable you to choose the length of your agreement. This gives you the choice of whether you want to lock in your fuel prices for just a few months, or a year or more. Fixed price fuel programs are available for both diesel and regular gasoline.
Fuel price protection is not a totally new concept, but it is relatively new to smaller fleets. Large fleets have been using their influence to get fixed fuel prices for a while now. With many trucks and substantial fuel needs, the promise of their patronage gives them a valuable bargaining chip.
Small fleets, on the other hand, are starting to take advantage of fuel price protection programs, as well. Even if you don’t have a hundred or more vehicles, you can enjoy the benefits of a fixed price program.
To demonstrate how valuable fuel price protection can be, let’s imagine that we have another spike in fuel prices, as we did in 2008. Your drivers fill their tanks at a fixed price of $3.00 per gallon, while the rest of the country is paying $4.41 per gallon. Let’s say you get 500 gallons a month at that fixed price. That means you are saving $7.05 a month, which works out to be about $8,000 per year if the price jump lasted that long. Could you stand to save $8,000 per year on your fleet budget? Who couldn’t?
There is another advantage to fuel price protection, above and beyond simply saving money if fuel prices jump again. Even when fuel prices only vary by a little bit every week, this makes it difficult for you, as the fleet’s manager, to run an effective budget. With a fixed price per gallon for fuel, however, you can stabilize your fuel costs, and better predict your spending weeks or even months in advance. This enables you to budget out months in advance, and make long-term plans based on your budget.
When combined with other tools for managing a successful fleet, such as assigning Fleet Mastercards to each vehicle for tracking fuel consumption and fleet service, fuel price protection helps you to minimize your fleet expenses and maximize your business’s profits.
Dec
15
Boost Credibility with Good Credentials
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There is a reason that people go to school to get advanced degrees. It is not only to get an education. It is also to get those little letters that go after their names on business cards. You may think that this doesn’t count for much but it can make the difference between a good job and a great one.
You do not necessarily have to get an advanced college degree to boost your own credibility in the business world. However you do need to look out for opportunities through which you can add some credentials to your own job title. Take advantage of any chance that you have to add some letters to your own name.
For example, let’s say that you want people to recognize that you are a green business person. You could get basic leed training. Alternatively you could work a little bit harder to become a leed green associate. This name sounds a lot fancier on paper and it gives you more credibility with your clients.
A lot is in a name. Even little letters and degrees make a big difference. You may or may not like that this is the way things are but you can’t deny that it’s the way it is. Play the game by getting the credentials that will move you along in the business world.
Jul
27
Survey Says
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I work for a city manager’s office. It is the city manager’s job to make sure that city government runs like a well oiled machine. But one of the things that are also important is that the citizens in the city feel as if their government is doing a good job. And what better way to find out how people feel than by asking them? So that is what we set out to do. We took a survey and it was no small undertaking.
We didn’t want a small representative sample. We wanted to go big. Since we are on the top of the food chain here in city hall, we had the perfect resource. We used our utility billing system. Every household that gets a water bill got a survey. And the response was terrific.
We knew going into this that we would not be able to hand tally the results. We knew that we would need special equipment for this. But that kind of scanning equipment is expensive. So we actually did a scanner rental. So as the surveys came in we would just feed them into this scanner that looked a bit like a copy machine. And when all was said and done, it appears that overall the citizens are very happy with the city services that they are receiving.
Jan
21
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