9 Secrets Series: Fuel card abuse happens, but it can be stopped

As a fleet owner, your day-to-day costs can quickly add up. Particularly when hidden and unnecessary costs are hurting your bottom line.

The amount of fuel wasted, how efficiently your staff drive, overpaying wages and how you keep track of it all, can make a huge difference when it comes to your ongoing expenses.

When you’re incredibly busy with on-site jobs and managing other areas of your business, it can be hard to identify what things aren’t as cost effective as they could be.

This series of blogs will look at how you can get a grip on such expenses and highlights nine surprising ways to lower your operating costs that you may not have even considered.

Secret 3: Fuel card abuse happens, but it can be stopped

Fuel cards can be a very convenient and easy way to manage your fleet’s fuel purchases. However, without the ability to accurately verify transactions against company vehicles, there is sometimes the potential for abuse to occur.

While you may trust your individual drivers (as you should), in reality it can be difficult to determine which specific vehicle the fuel was purchased for. Regrettably, fuel theft and fuel card abuse does happen, and, in some companies, it can be quite common and very costly.

Think about this… Your employee fills up their personal car with a full tank of fuel. They open their wallet to pay for the fuel and pull out your company fuel card. They do this once a month, along with 5 of your other drivers at an average cost of £50 per tank of fuel. That’s £3,000 of fuel each year that is not spent filling up your company vehicles, or your bottom line.

Fuel card integration with a fleet management system like Verizon Connect Reveal can help towards eliminating fuel card abuse. You can identify if the fuel pumped into the vehicle exceeded the tank of the assigned vehicle, or even if the company vehicle wasn’t at the pump at the time the fuel card was used.

You can read the rest of our 9 Secrets in our eBook.