How Fuel Cards Help Businesses To Operate More Efficiently

Fuel costs are often one of the biggest expenditures facing companies and can equally affect businesses that are operating on a local or national scale from the self employed van driver to a substantial corporate fleet of vehicles, so finding a way to decrease the mounting fuel costs is essential. Achieving a reduction in fuel expenditure may be easier than you may think with the use of business fuel cards.

Purchasing fuel for your company’s vehicles using a fuel card can provide discounts because it can freeze the price of the fuel you buy over the course of a week, in advance. So, even if there is a rise in fuel costs that takes effect that week, you will be exempt from it. You can also limit the fuel stations that your employees can use to certain chains that may be cheaper than others, or to stations that are not on more expensive routes such as motorways and ‘A’ roads. Use of the card can be also limited to fuel only, if you wish, so that nothing unauthorised can be bought on the card, further protecting your businesses from unnecessary costs.

Depending on the fuel card company that you use, it is easy to analyse your fuel consumption to see if other efficiencies can be made, such as route optimisation (planning routes in advance, whilst being aware of traffic ‘hotspots’). In this instance it is effective to combine the use of a vehicle tracking system with a fuel card for maximum benefit.

Fuel cards decrease your need for admin from both the mobile worker and office employee when it is time for expenses to be submitted because the data is already available via detailed reports, so receipts won’t need to be submitted. If your office employees have more time to focus on other tasks then this is another cost saving that fuel cards provide to your business. The fuel card data is usually available online, along with a detailed VAT breakdown in your company name. It is important that VAT invoices are in your company name because this means that you can claim the VAT back from fuel transactions, meaning 20% of the money you spend on fuel will be reimbursed to you, further helping your finances.

Statistically, a lot can be gained from the data that fuel cards provide, often including, how fuel efficient each vehicle in the fleet has been performing. If you do not have a fuel card that disables usage on motorways, or haven’t activated that part of your card, you can identify which of your drivers are using more expensive fuel stations, and then start a process of ‘driver education’.

There are many companies that offer fuel cards. The benefit of this to your business is that it means that you have a lot of choice and can choose the fuel card that suits your needs the best. However, it can get a little confusing so the best thing to do when choosing your fuel card is to use a comparison table such as that available on TrackCompare.co.uk to first of identify and shortlist the fuel cards that we be best suited to your business.