You have a fleet of vehicles to manage, a team of workers to dispatch, and repairs that need to be done on the double. Fuel costs represent the greatest yet most often taken-for-granted hidden challenge property maintenance businesses face. You can’t always fight the ebb and flow of unstable and unpredictable fuel prices. You can, however, fight to control fuel expenditure. That’s where a fuel card can help.
A Smarter Way to Manage Fuel Expenses
Repairing and maintaining properties can’t be done without driving to and from locations multiple times daily. Fuel costs look deceptively low when distilled into one large monthly sum on your statements, but over time, they add up. Imagine how many opportunities for fuel wastage and misuse can happen without oversight.
Fuel cards can help property maintenance businesses control spending and fully understand how, where, and why their money is being spent. They prevent you from playing that all-too-common refund game and can help you save lots of money in the long run.
Simplify Administration and Improve Efficiency
With a fuel card, you don’t have to waste time entering fuel costs into a laborious paper-based spreadsheet. When you have an entire fleet to account for and multiple workers taking cards to fuel vehicles for a day’s work, time soon adds up. Plus, it eliminates errors, improves the reliability of your reports, and helps you concentrate on growing your business.
When you’re drawing every penny from a small business budget, even the smallest savings can make a big difference. Incorrect odometer readings, inflated fuel rates, and unauthorized transactions can drain that budget in no time if there is no way to control expenses. That is why a fuel card takes the weight off your shoulders when running your business.
Control and Flexibility for Your Fleet
A property maintenance worker’s day is never the same. One moment, they could be fixing a broken pipe, and the next moment, they could be cutting a tree. Thankfully, gone are the days of being tied to a single fuel station. Don’t restrict your business to a single station only to look for your credit card invoice later! You can authorize and restrict your cards by fuel type, number of transactions in a day, and fuel tank size or cost.
For example, you might have to set limits if you have a small van that mainly takes short journeys. The same applies if you have larger vehicles used by your maintenance managers. This provides property maintenance owners with an apples-to-apples understanding of expenses and ensures you’re spending where you should, not where you shouldn’t.
Access to Valuable Insights
Fuel cards aren’t just a convenient way to pay for your fuel. They also give you valuable data insight into your fuel consumption. In fact, with real-time reporting, you can dive into the fuel efficiency of each vehicle, its use across your team, and areas where spending isn’t what it should be. From there, the possibilities are endless.
For example, if you discover one or more of your vehicles are burning through more fuel than the rest, you might want to look into why. Also, if one vehicle is burning through more fuel than an equivalent vehicle, that’s a tell-tale sign something might be busted —mechanically or inefficiently.
A Win for Your Business
The key takeaway is that managing fuel doesn’t have to be a headache or drain your business finances. For property maintenance companies to be successful, they need to have more control over the uncontrollable. That means being able to proactively set limits, adjust limits, and make changes while knowing the administrative burden isn’t going to consume too much time.
Fuel cards enable property maintenance companies to have more control over their fuel costs, streamline their work management process, and drive more profit in delivering their service.
