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9 Secrets to Reducing your Fleet Expenses.

The amount of fuel wasted, how efficiently your staff drive, overpaying wages, and how you keep track of it all, can make a huge difference when it comes to your ongoing expenses.

When you’re incredibly busy with on-site jobs and managing other areas of your business, it can be hard to identify when and where things aren’t as cost effective as they could be.

To help you get a grip on such expenses, here are nine ways to lower your operating costs that you may not have considered…

As a fleet owner, your day-to-day costs can quickly add up. Particularly when hidden and unnecessary costs are hurting your bottom line.

Think about this… Your employee starts work late on Tuesday morning. On Wednesday afternoon, he finishes work earlier than he should. But... when he submits his time sheet, it shows a normal start time for Tuesday and a normal finish time for Wednesday.

You only bill your customers for hours worked — and it should be the same with your staff.

If you use manual timesheets to record your staff’s hours, how do you know with absolute certainty that the hours they’re submitting are accurate?

If your timesheets aren’t accurate — even if it’s just by small increments — you’re simply giving away money that should be going into your pocket.

Staff rounding up their hours on a regular basis can mean significant extra costs for you. Even an extra 15 minutes here and there, across an entire fleet, can really take its toll on your bottom line.

Without an accurate and reliable employee tracking software in place, the full scope of your payroll is — to some extent — in your employees’ hands. It’s simply not worth exposing your business — and your profit — to this level of financial risk.

1Stop paying for hours not worked.

Think about this… Your employee takes your company vehicle home at nights and on the weekends. He’s home and he needs to run some errands. Your company vehicle and his personal vehicle are both sitting on the driveway. Which vehicle do you want him to use?

Do your drivers use your company vehicle — and your company fuel to run personal errands after hours?

How much company fuel (which you are paying for) are your staff wasting on personal trips? How much wear and tear are they adding to your vehicle?

If a staff member has a company car and personal car sitting in the driveway after hours, it can be all-too-easy to choose the company vehicle (and company fuel) for an outing — instead of their own.

As a fleet owner, fuel can be an enormous and ever fluctuating

cost, and one that’s hard to control — let alone to predict.

Without GPS tracking in each of your vehicles, there’s simply no way for you to know if a driver is using your company vehicle after hours — or even over a weekend — while you’re paying for the fuel.

2You’re paying for wasted fuel.

Think about this… Your employee fills up his personal car

with a full tank of fuel. He opens his wallet

to pay for his fuel and pulls out your

company fuel card.

Fuel cards can be a very convenient and easy way to manage your fleet’s fuel purchases. However, with no ability to accurately verify transactions against company vehicles, there is potential for abuse.

While you may trust your individual drivers, in reality, you have very little knowledge about which vehicle the fuel was purchased for. Regrettably, fuel theft and fuel card abuse does happen — and it happens often.

Fuel card integration with a fleet management system can help eliminate fuel card abuse. You can identify if the fuel pumped into the vehicle exceeded the tank of the assigned vehicle, or even if the company vehicle wasn’t at the pump at the time the fuel card was used.

3Don’t be fooled by fuel card abuse.

Think about this… The company vehicle is parked on the kerb. During your employee’s one-hour lunch break, he sits in the company vehicle and eats his lunch. The engine is running. The radio is playing. The air-con is on full blast. Your fuel is being wasted on needless idling.

Do you know how well (or how poorly) your individual drivers perform on the roads?

Idling is not the only bad habit that will keep your fuel bills high either — speeding and sharp acceleration all waste take their toll too — as well as adding significant wear and tear to your vehicles.

4Bad habits need to change.

Think about this… Are you giving your vehicles enough tender love and care? Do you know when your vehicles are due for maintenance and servicing checks?

Depreciating vehicle values — and everyday wear and tear — can weigh heavily on your bottom line. While vehicles are expensive to maintain, unexpected mechanical issues — and premature replacement costs — can be much, much greater long term.

The more you look after your fleet, the less it will cost you in the long run, and this means you need regular maintenance and servicing. However, staying up-to-date with your fleet’s maintenance and service requirements can be a time consuming — and therefore, potentially costly — exercise.

If you don’t have fleet management software in place, which offers the benefit of regular service and maintenance reminders (in accordance with the date, mileage or even hours of use) you could be incurring considerable and unnecessary costs over time.

5Are you letting your vehicles down?

When it comes to your day-to-day operations — do you have tiring manual processes in place which could be automated?

Relying on manual processes can be extremely time consuming, and unnecessarily so. Just imagine, for instance, how much extra time that you — or a member of your team — would have if you didn’t need to check your staff’s handwritten timesheets and then enter their hours into a payroll system.

As well as being inefficient and time consuming, manual processes also mean a far greater likelihood of error. Even a small error in calculating a staff member’s hours may lead to you accidently paying out far more than is necessary.

Similarly, manual systems have no real checks and balances. Imagine if you were able to determine — via a simple alert in a cloud-based system — if a company vehicle was being used after hours. Or which drivers were wasting the most fuel.

By switching to a more automated system — to eliminate manual processes wherever possible — you’ll also have far more time to focus on what’s important: managing and growing your business.

6Manual processes — outdated and so overpriced.

Think about this… Are outdated manual processes costing you more money than you think? Can you get a rapid return on investment and save money in your business with automated systems?

Think about this… Are your drivers taking the shortest routes to minimise fuel usage?

When it comes to getting from A to B, are your drivers following the quickest and most efficient route? If not, how much fuel are they wasting in the process — and what impact is this having on your business’ carbon footprint and fuel bill?

To ensure your fleet is operating as efficiently as possible, a reliable GPS fleet tracking system can add enormous value. It can help you ensure that the fastest route — and the one that requires the least amount of fuel — can be quickly and easily identified.

With accurate information at your fingertips, you can also provide your customers with far more accurate information regarding arrival times for particular jobs.

Essentially, by taking the most efficient route, you’ll be going green and saving money.

7Optimising A to B.

Staff may carelessly complete job sheets, not accounting for the accurate start and finish times. So, when it comes to billing your customers, you are simply relying on the times your staff have submitted. These times may be rounded down or they may even be missing hours that you haven’t billed your customer for!

With GPS tracking, you can verify start and finish times. This ensures you charge your customers for any additional hours your staff worked on site. Also, if a customer disputes a bill, you have accurate data to support your case.

8Don’t short-change yourself.

Think about this… Are you billing your customers for the correct hours? Have you short-changed yourself because you don’t know the accurate start and finish times of jobs?

As a business owner, your time is precious. Yet, how much time do you and your team currently waste running the same reports, building the same graphs or creating the same tables? How frustrated does this make you?

It’s high time you looked for ways to streamline and simplify these everyday activities. As well as providing you with much greater levels of insight into your fleet, you should look into software that can help you to get through administrative tasks much faster, and with far less hassle.

Just imagine the benefit of having scheduled reporting with your data about your fleet compiled in a dashboard — which you can have at your fingertips. The more time you spend focused on the administrative aspects of your fleet management, the less time and money you have to focus on the bigger picture.

9Timing is everything.

Think about this… Time is money. Save time. Save money.

So, what’s the solution?To genuinely control your fleet costs, cut fuel wastage, and save precious time and money, it’s important to invest in a reliable and accurate fleet management system — such as Verizon Connect Reveal.

Visit: www.verizonconnect.com/au/reveal-demo or call 1800 039 642.

www.verizonconnect.com/au 1800 039 642

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