Depreciating vehicle values – and everyday wear and tear – can weigh heavily on your bottom line. Here are tips to reduce your road expenses as you grow your business.
As the owner of a growing business with a team out on the field, your daily costs can quickly add up. What you don’t know is there may be further hidden, expensive and needless costs that are hurting your bottom line. 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. Here are five tips to help you reduce your road expenses.
Automate and correct payroll spend
You only bill your customers for hours that are true – and it should be the same with your staff – only paying for hours worked that are true. Manual timesheets to record your staff’s hours run the risk of inaccuracies, as staff rounding up or down their hours on a regular basis can have a significant impact on your payroll expenses. An accurate and reliable employee tracking software in place can provide you greater visibility and control over the full scope of your payroll. By switching to a more automated system, there would be a far lesser likelihood of error so that you are only paying for hours worked, removing any excess payroll expenses.
Stop paying for wasted fuel
Fuel can be an enormous and ever fluctuating cost and one that’s hard to control. Without a vehicle tracking system in place, there is no way to track unauthorised use of the company vehicle. A staff member who chooses to use the company car during the weekend (instead of their own vehicle) to run personal errands is costing you! To help ensure your fleet is operating as efficiently as possible, a tracking system can add enormous value by alerting you to after-hours use of company vehicles to make sure the business is not paying for unnecessary fuel and through wear and tear to the vehicle.
Bad habits need to change
Do you know how well (or how poorly) your individual drivers perform on the roads? Poor driving habits – such as excessive idling, speeding and quick acceleration – all waste significant amounts of fuel. For example, a driver’s lunch habit of sitting in their vehicle with the engine and the air-conditioning running wastes valuable fuel that you, as a business owner, are paying for. The extra fuel required by wasted engine time, poor driving, and the excess wear and tear on your vehicles, very quickly adds up.
Are you letting your vehicles down?
Depreciating vehicle values – and everyday wear and tear – can weigh heavily on your bottom line. The more you look after your vehicles through regular maintenance and servicing, the less it will cost you in the long run. GPS vehicle tracking can provide regular service and maintenance reminders (in accordance with the date, mileage or even hours of use) to help prevent you from incurring considerable and unnecessary costs over time.
Eliminate fuel card abuse
Fuel cards can be a very convenient and easy way to manage your fleet’s fuel purchases. However, with no ability to accurately verify fuel transactions against company vehicles, there is potential for abuse. Regrettably, fuel theft and fuel card abuse happens. 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, or even if the company vehicle wasn’t at the pump at the time the fuel card was used.
Todd Ewing, Director Product Marketing, Fleetmatics
