Fleet management is the process of turning real-time data into data-driven, distance-saving decisions. By storing your fuel card data in a single spreadsheet instead of optimizing it, you waste time and limit your fleet management’s power to protect your bottom line. This is because your first line of defense against reactive budgeting is visibility. By prioritizing visibility, your budget can be accurately managed, and your fleet lease can be used to its full potential. At Glesby Marks, we strive to help our lessees not only find tailored fleet leases for their unique needs, but we also help equip them with the most modern fleet management tools to help improve their team’s performance.
The High Cost of Disconnected Fleet Data
In many companies, fuel cards and leases are used like two gears in the same machine. Although they are both constantly spinning, they never touch or interact. Using both gears together drives the engine forward with fewer resources while increasing speed and efficiency. This is primarily because when fleet management is separate from fuel card data and reporting, it turns problem-solving into a purely reactive process, eliminating the possibility of predictability and optimization.
The biggest factor in disconnected fleet management is double-handling, or in other terms, using multiple administrative roles in order to achieve a shared goal. Not only does doing this result in a higher rate of simple human error, but it also slows down processes due to multiple tasks, such as:
- Exporting fuel reports
- Downloading lease invoices
- Cross-referencing vehicle VIN numbers and driver IDs
By doing this, one simple misstep can result in completely mismanaged budgets and severe fallout.
The Financial Blind Spots in Fleet Management
Fleet management for fuel card data is essential for preventing disconnection within your system. When there is a lingering gap between fuel card data and a lease, there are many ways that your budget may be out of your control. By working with our team at Glesby Marks to leverage your fuel usage data, we can help you manage your lease accurately to avoid these common fleet leasing budget blind spots. This section will dive deeper into these common blind spots and how they can negatively affect your company’s bottom line.
A common problem with disconnected fuel card data is odometer lag. This is when, instead of instant data visibility, each mileage figure is exported and linked to a driver’s data. This often results in unexpectedly high costs at the end of your lease term, with drivers unknowingly blowing through their fuel allotment. This is why entering into a flexible, tailored fleet lease through Glesby Marks is paramount. We can help not only manage your fleet fuel usage based on immediate usage data, but we can also alter and flex your lease details as your needs grow or shrink.
Additionally, fuel management strategies are inherently linked to vehicle acquisition. When you work with a team like Glesby Marks, our team can assist with securing the best, most modern models of vehicles. Along with this, this gives you the knowledge of their exact fuel capacity, which plays a huge role in calculating fuel budget for each member of the fleet. Our system of fleet fuel management plays a role in this by notifying our technicians instantly when any discrepancy is detected. This helps locate and solve the problem quickly, before it impacts your quarterly statements, turning your reactive and inefficient system into a streamlined powerhouse, saving you valuable time and money.
How Fuel Management Integration Modernizes Your Business
Integrated fleet management goes far beyond just allowing our team to manage your data. By adopting a more integrated approach to fleet management, you can create an autonomous budgeting system that prevents financial surprises and helps you effortlessly achieve long-term financial goals.
Managing a company can be overwhelming. Many times, when companies opt for in-house fleet management, it results in spreading their own dedicated staff much too thinly. By working with a dedicated team like Glesby Marks, your own team is able to focus more on their own unique roles, instead of struggling with fleet acquisition, fleet management, and devaluing units.
The biggest challenge for many companies struggling with managing fuel card data and other facets of fleet management is not having a centralized dashboard. Glesby marks fleet management offers a full-scale solution by giving you and your managers a place to find all odometer and fuel card data for every individual fleet vehicle and driver. Additionally, our control can go even further, helping you prevent overspending based on poor driver judgment. Our system authorizes fuel purchases only when the vehicle’s odometer falls within a specific range. This allows you to pinpoint outliers like unnecessary trips, inefficient routing, or poor driving habits like speeding and harsh braking.
Finally, we can also utilize geofencing to ensure that drivers are only using your precious fuel when necessary, helping to cut back on unnecessary fleet usage. Not only does this significantly save you money, but it can help protect the quality and depreciation of the vehicle, which is essential, especially for capital fleet leases.
4 Strategic Benefits of Integrated Fleet Fuel Reporting
Data is only as useful as your ability to base a decision on it. While “integrated” is a term that many industries often use and can make them sound impressive on paper, when it comes to fleet management, it is a paramount aspect of optimizing your system. Combining fleet management with fuel card data gives you and your company full control over your budget. The four biggest advantages include:
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- Precise lifecycle management: When you follow fuel trends, it can often help pinpoint the exact day that your fleet becomes a liability instead of a strategic asset. By carefully tracking fuel consumption and maintenance requirements, we can help keep your fleet safe by replacing each vehicle as it begins to decline.
- Automated fraud prevention and transaction protection: When fuel cards are accurately tracked based on each vehicle’s tank capacity and optimized route planning, it is significantly easier to highlight fraudulent card usage. Otherwise called a self-auditing loop of transaction integrity.
- Accurate Total Cost of Ownership: One of the biggest aspects of fleet leasing is realizing the significant savings it brings when compared to the total cost of ownership. When you use fleet management services, you can save money by not owning the fleet due to dynamic tracking and flexible fleet sizing.
- Proactive lease compliance: Finally, by using Glesby Marks for fuel card data tracking, you can avoid any end-of-lease surprises by managing difficulties or inaccuracies as they occur instead of at the end of your lease term.
Letting your fuel usage data slip away each month is costing you big bucks in the long run. Work with Glesby marks to optimize your savings and get the most usage out of your fleet. Contact us today for a free fleet lease estimate.