How To Successfully Manage Business Vehicle Expenses
Tools and Tips for Fleet Management
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Running a business that requires vehicles to perform its operations can be costly. Not only do you need to invest in qualified drivers and vehicles, but you also need to maintain the vehicles and pay for fuel.
If you want to manage the cost of your business fleet and keep your expenses as low as possible, here’s how.
Control Fuel Costs
Fuel costs are forever increasing, meaning your business is spending more and more money on fueling its fleet. Although fuel is necessary so you can maintain operations, you need to be aware of how much you are spending and learn how to control it.
Getting fleet cards by Coast will enable you to gain better visibility into your fuel expenses, ensuring you are spending within your budget and can set controls as to how much employees can spend. Closely monitoring your business expenses this way, by having control over employees’ debit card spending, will guarantee you stay within your financial means every month.
Buy the Right Vehicles
Furthermore, buying the right business vehicles for your needs will ensure you have invested your money wisely. If you buy vehicles that will add no purpose or lack functionality, such as vans that are too small to move products, then you will have wasted your money.
Whereas, if you plan what type of vehicle you will need, you can ensure to spend your money wisely and make the best business decision.
Pay to Use Employee Vehicles
If your business can get away with using cars for their transportation methods, it won’t hurt to ask if you can use employees’ vehicles.
For instance, if you run a delivery service, it can make sense to use employees’ cars as the space inside will be sufficient enough for transporting the deliveries.
This will reduce your vehicle expenses as you will not need to pay out for vehicles, nor will you need to fund maintenance, servicing and more. You will still need to pay for fuel, as you cannot expect drivers to cover this.
Use a Fuel Calculator
To calculate fuel costs and ensure you are paying your employees the correct amount for fuel, it is a wise idea to use a fuel calculator. This will ensure that you are covering the fuel costs and paying for how many miles your business needs to cover.
This will help you ensure you are not overpaying and being scammed by your employees, which would counteract the potential savings for this process.
Hire a Vehicle Maintenance Manager
It is a smart idea for your business to hire a fleet maintenance manager so that you can ensure to service all of your vehicles when they need it, which will keep them in their best condition.
Instead of you needing to take your vehicles to be serviced, a fleet manager can do it on your behalf, which will save you time and maximize your business efficiency. Maximum business efficiency equals more profit, which will help you enhance your expenses rather than hinder them.
Create and Sustain a Maintenance Schedule
It is cost and time efficient for your business to create and maintain a vehicle maintenance schedule.
Most vehicles need servicing and maintenance every few months. Therefore, creating a schedule where all of your vehicles go in for maintenance every three months will ensure that they are kept in their best condition.
Maintaining vehicles all at one time maximizes your time and ensures that you can uncover any issues with the fleet, so you can fix them as soon as possible and reduce disruptions and higher emergency maintenance costs.
If you leave your vehicles without maintenance for some time, they might experience more issues, which will cost you more money. Therefore, maintaining them regularly will ensure to level out your expenses and help you spend less on your business fleet.
Implement and Maintain Driver Policies
You will not want to experience your vehicles being lost, stolen or damaged due to improper driver usage. Therefore, it is essential that your business implements and maintains driver policies among your entire business fleet.
This would ensure all drivers know the rules to follow to keep the vehicles in their best condition.
Although your drivers will already hold a license and know how to drive safely, it is important that you have them take driver training so that they understand how to use your vehicles safely and maintain them while in use.
Keeping Your Fleet Clean
It is important for the curb appeal of your business to keep your vehicles as clean as possible. It will benefit your business greatly if your vehicles can drive around looking sparkling clean. This will impress customers as it will prove that you care about the appearance of your business as well as the quality of the product or service you’re delivering to them.
It is good to keep your business vehicles as clean as possible. You could hire a cleaning team or clean the vehicles yourself on a regular basis to ensure that they are as gleaming as possible.
It doesn’t take much experience or skill to clean vehicles expertly, so it makes sense to you wish to save money to clean them yourselves.
Seek the Best Insurance
It is essential that every business attains insurance to cover the entire fleet. Having the right insurance policy in place will ensure that if anything happens, you are fully covered and do not need to pay an extortionate amount to recover the vehicle or any issue you have experienced.
If you use the right insurance company to insure your flea, the chances are that you will likely get a discount on insuring multiple vehicles at one time. This will help you reduce your expenses, yet obtain the best insurance policy, ensuring you manage your finances.
Invest in Electric Vehicles
You might be paying a lot for your vehicle expenses due to the increasing fuel costs. If this is the case, you might wish to consider investing in electric vehicles as they are much cheaper to run. Instead of paying for those grueling fuel prices, you need to pay a smaller fee to charge them at home or at the business.
Furthermore, many governments and local authorities will offer you discounts when you purchase electric vehicles as it is helping the planet. You can save on the purchase of an electric vehicle, which will reduce your vehicle expenses overall.
Downsize your Fleet and Maximize the Size of Your Vehicles
For some businesses, it might be possible to downsize your fleet by maximizing the size of your vehicles, which will still help you run the same quantity of business as before.
For instance, you might run a delivery service and instead of hiring 10 vehicles to perform deliveries, you can hire 5 larger ones to perform the same quantity of deliveries.
Using this guide, your business can best understand how to successfully manage vehicle expenses. You will notice that you do not need to pay an extortionate fee to invest in vehicles, maintain them and pay for their fuel costs. It can be as simple as getting credit cards that you can control, calculating the potential fuel costs, investing in electric vehicles and performing regular service. Using these tips, you’ll guarantee to reduce and have better control over your business vehicle expenses.
