Fleet Expenses
Fleet Management
4 Ways to Successfully Manage Vehicle Expenses
Dan Ewald
Spend management is all the rage in today's business world. Employees spend the company's money in a myriad of ways, for numerous reasons. Here's how fleet managers can contribute to the reduction effort.
Key Elements to Managing Employee Spending
There are several key elements to successfully managing employee spending, without taking on additional administrative overhead:
- Know what the spend is - you can’t manage what you don’t see.
- Use fleet programs - most fleet suppliers provide a full menu of fleet and fleet-related programs.
- Make full use of any controls - these programs offer to prevent wasteful spending before it happens.
- Limit driver involvement.
Source: Fleet Financials (November 2011)
This is very good advice and something that Ewald Fleet Solutions can assist you with. Let's take a closer look.
What It Means
If you are not adequately managing all cost areas associated with your vehicles, you could be exposing your company to unnecessary expenses. Placing vehicles in service and relying solely on good judgment by your drivers to monitor maintenance and fuel costs is not sufficient. Properly tracking and monitoring all fuel and maintenance transactions and benchmarking these costs are key factors in controlling and identifying areas of overspending on variable costs.
What You Can Do
Be certain you manage all expenses associated with the four major cost areas; vehicle acquisition, depreciation, maintenance, and fuel. Regardless of the size of your fleet, you will benefit from planning and researching vehicle options prior to replacement. You will also benefit from capturing and recording all of your vehicle maintenance and fuel expenses. Data tracking is important for benchmarking costs, monitoring spends, and beneficial when identifying the best time to replace a vehicle.
How You Can Get Started
If you are already a customer of Ewald Fleet Solutions (EFS), you can simply request an analysis of your fleet spend for your next scheduled fleet review. If you are not a current customer of EFS, we would be happy to extend a no-cost-no-obligation fleet analysis to you.
If you have an interest in taking action after reviewing our analysis, we can provide you with recommendations and steer you to fleet programs that will install oversight and prevent wasteful spending.
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