The best way to budget for fleet management is to know exactly how much it costs to run your fleet. This requires you to take your fixed costs, like financing and insurance, and your variable costs, like fuel and maintenance, to accurately evaluate every expense per vehicle.
Did you know that human factors contribute to over 90% of road accidents and fatalities? Now you might be thinking, what does that have to do with managing your fleet? But when you have a tool that actively monitors your drivers, you can significantly improve how they’re driving, which directly impacts how much money your fleet is using.
When you invest in a robust fleet management system like the one from Cartrack, you can easily make sure your fleet is staying on budget! Let’s see how.
You need a tool to budget for your fleet so that you’re able to accurately manage and control the high operational costs that come with running a fleet. Even if you only have a fleet of five cars, you need a tool to assist you with truly working out the TOC of your fleet. It’s almost impossible without one.
There are some major factors, both expected and unexpected, that can affect your fleet’s budget. When you don’t accurately monitor and track these things, your business will basically be throwing money away. You won’t truly know how much money your fleet is wasting; therefore, you won’t know how to stop it from happening.
There these are:
Let's break these down👇
It’s common knowledge that fuel is one of the biggest expenses of any business. According to data, about 35 to 55 percent of the daily operational running costs of transport companies in South Africa are fuel, and currently diesel is over R31.00 per litre.
Refuelling your vehicles isn't the only time your business is spending money on fuel. Fuel is also costing you money when it’s being wasted from excessive idling or stolen through syphoning. Ultimately businesses end up spending more money on fuel than what’s actually necessary.
When a vehicle is stolen/hijacked, a business is hit in multiple ways.
Depending on the type of insurance you have, excess fees alone can cost you anywhere from R2 000 to R20 000+, and that probably doesn’t even cover the goods lost in the process.
On top of that, if you don’t have a spare vehicle, you're going to lose money from the unexpected operational downtime.
That’s why when you don’t have the proper tools to protect the vehicles in your fleet, it’s like you're just leaving money lying around for anyone to take.
When you have a fleet, no matter the size, you need to have insurance. Trucks carrying cargo are more likely to have insanely high insurance rates. This is because trucks are not only very expensive, but they also spend a lot of time on the roads, travel on dangerous roads at odd hours, and often carry expensive loads.
Maintenance costs can rack up quite the bill for businesses. From smaller services like oil changes, brake pads and new tyres to major breakdowns and repairs that put your truck out of service for a while, these all end up costing your business money.
When you’re not monitoring the health of your vehicles, they’ll break down when you least expect it and reduce their lifespan, costing you thousands and thousands of rands. And it’s not just the repairs that cost you money; it's the unexpected operational downtime that costs you as well.
While often forgotten, driver behaviour plays a major role in fleet waste costs. Driver behaviour affects costs through:
There are quite a few hidden things that are wasting money in your fleet, and you might not even realise it! These are:
A fleet management system helps you manage your fleet’s budget by helping you see your fleet’s TOC. It uses a combination of hardware and software to accurately track and monitor your vehicles, assets, drivers and admin so that you have a complete overview of your operations all on one platform.
Let’s take the 6 main costs of a fleet and see how an FMS helps with these.
A fleet management system helps you manage your fleet’s fuel budget in the following ways:
On average about 50 vehicles are hijacked every day in South Africa. This is why it's important that you have a tracking device from a provider like Cartrack with a high recovery rate and an in-house recovery team.
For example, if you have a fleet of 60 trucks, you’re more likely to be a statistic. Tracking devices that are part of a comprehensive fleet management system can save your business hundreds of thousands of rands in the event of theft.
The Cartrack bonus: We have an anti-jamming Cartrack Tag that uses our unique radio frequency so we can track your vehicle even if the signal is blocked on your main tracking unit!
How do you bring down the exuberant insurance costs? Having an insurance-approved tracking device installed in every vehicle in your fleet can play a major role in this. Installing cameras coupled with telematics data will greatly assist with accident claims as well! These tools can bring down the amount of money your business is spending on accidents and insurance.
The Cartrack bonus: Our track record makes us a top choice among insurance companies in South Africa!
An FMS can help you schedule and manage all vehicle maintenance tasks, from daily inspections to a gearbox showing signs of a malfunction. These insights mean your fleet is always in tip-top shape, and when a major repair needs to happen, you will have already known and prepared for it, avoiding a potential accident or unexpected breakdown.
These insights allow you to not only save money but also accurately budget for repairs as well.
The Cartrack bonus: We have custom sensor integrations for specialised machinery that can monitor the equipment. Providing you with data to assess their condition so you can implement preventative maintenance to keep these optimised for use and minimise unexpected breakdowns.
With a fleet management system, you can accurately monitor how your drivers are performing on the roads. The telematics device paired with AI-powered cameras allows you to not only have the data to see how your drivers were performing but also the visual data to see what they were doing while driving as well.
The major benefit is that the AI cameras not only immediately alert you as the fleet manager to a driving event, but they also come with instant in-cabin alerts so the driver is able to immediately correct their mistake.
The Cartrack bonus: Our system includes driver scorecards so your drivers are automatically rated on their driving performance, allowing you to individually coach each driver based on problem areas!
When it comes to all those pesky hidden costs, let's look at how having Cartrack’s fleet management system can help your budget:
The Cartrack bonus: Worried about how much you're spending on lost or damaged stock? Our camera solutions can be placed inside the cargo area to monitor & record every time the door is opened, so you have eyes on your stock anytime anyone is near it!
If you’re ready to have a complete understanding of your fleet’s TCO, then give us a call to see how we can help you save money and budget more effectively!
Discover how a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) system helps you accurately budget for fuel, maintenance, and hidden fleet costs with Cartrack.
