The Importance of Strong Fleet Management Reports

The Importance of Strong Fleet Management Reports

If the idea of pouring over the reports from your fleet management software doesn’t exactly excite you, you’re not alone. There aren’t too many people who walk into the office, pour a cup of coffee, sit down at their desk, and think, “I can’t wait to start going through all of these reports!”

The truth, however, is that those reports are a critical piece of the overall picture of the health of your company’s fleet operations. Without strong reporting and the ability to analyze the data in those reports, important information can slip through the cracks and cost you time and your company money.

Reports help to predict the future. The reports provided by your fleet management software should make it easy to identify things that are going well and pinpoint those things that could lead to trouble further down the road.

If a particular vehicle is losing fuel economy and requiring fill-ups more frequently, it is only monitoring your reports and spotting that trend that allows you to get that vehicle off the road and in for service before a small problem turns into a larger and more expensive one.

At the same time, reports that indicate smooth operations can reinforce assumptions about particular business practices. Measuring and testing is the only way to know whether a particular plan is achieving the desired results, and it is your reports that will provide those measurements.

Reports are critical for purchase decisions. Vehicles aren’t cheap. Regardless of whether you’re buying one or several, the cost of vehicles will always be a significant line on a year-end accounting report.

It is impossible to rely on notes, emails, or conversations with others when it comes to making decisions on replacing existing vehicles or adding to your fleet. There are usually just too many vehicles to take into consideration. The only way to aid the decisions in these cases is good, strong data from proper reports.

Raw data doesn’t lie. It’s the difference between thinking that a particular vehicle is costing you too much money in repairs and service or knowing, to the penny, how much has been spent on that vehicle this year.

Reports can identify inefficiency or employee dishonesty. We all like to think that we’ve hired the best people that we can for our companies. We don’t like to consider that after we trusted someone enough to bring them into the families that our companies represent, that they would then turn around and do something disloyal or dishonest. But, the hard truth is that it happens.

Reports are fantastic at identifying anomalies; those things that stick out and don’t quite look right. If all of your vehicles maintain a certain average of fuel consumption or yearly mileage and then one starts to stray far outside of that average, you may have an employee that is using that vehicle for non-work related uses. Worse, what if the vehicle’s fuel reports don’t match your fleet credit card? What is really happening when that vehicle is out on the road?

Good reports give you that critical 30,000 foot view of the overall picture of your fleet. They let you look not so much at the pieces, but at the whole. And then, when necessary, a quality reporting function will let you zero in on the data for any particular vehicle at any given time. It is that data that could save your company tens of thousands of dollars this year.