Summer is almost here, and with it comes peak season for those in pools, pests, and construction businesses. As these businesses gear up for their busiest and most profitable months, it’s time to rethink using fuel card programs that are difficult to manage and cut into your profits.
In this post, we share how you can cut your fuel cards and avoid a hectic summer with Car IQ’s streamlined vehicle payment solution.
Challenges During Peak Season
- Expanding Workforce
Peak season often requires hiring a slew of new or temporary employees to handle the surge in business. It’s hard enough finding enough hands to do the work, not to mention quickly training these new hires so they can do their jobs well. This rush to ramp up can lead to gaps in service quality if not managed properly.
Moreover, with each new employee comes issuing and mailing a new fuel card. This introduces more administrative tasks and when you add more drivers into the mix, the risk of fraud increases too. At the end of the day, if a company’s spending rules are relaxed and drivers know their charges are widely unsupervised, nothing holds them back from using their fuel card beyond the confines of fueling their tank.
- Increased Costs
As the workload and number of employees increase, so do the operational costs. This includes not only direct expenses like fuel and supplies, which are obvious, but also less visible costs caused by overtime, increased wear on equipment, and new employees unfamiliar with their routes. Each project or job site draws more resources, which can strain budgets, especially if not planned for in advance.
- Maintaining Quality
With your employees spread across multiple projects, ensuring consistent quality can be difficult. The challenge here is to ensure that every job meets customer expectations, regardless of how busy the season gets. Any slip in quality can impact customer satisfaction and the company’s reputation.
How Car IQ Can Help
- Seamless set up (and offboarding)
Car IQ provides a much simpler and cost-effective way to incorporate seasonal workers. Instead of issuing and activating a new card for every new employee, fleet managers can easily add and activate all vehicles on Car IQ’s platform. And when it comes time to offboard seasonable employees, you won’t need to chase them and their fleet cards down — simply deactivate them in the platform.
- Automatic vehicle data
You’re not hiring employees during peak season so they can spend the summer manually entering odometer readings or PIN codes. Yet, to get accurate vehicle data in fleet card payment systems, that’s what’s required of drivers. This is a common source of dirty data for fuel cards; drivers enter incorrect numbers, making it hard to accurately track vehicle data. However, with Car IQ, drivers can unlock the pump and pay by simply selecting the pump number and fueling up. This allows workers to get back on the road fast to do what you hired them to do.
- A single ledger
Our easy-to-use portal allows your finance department to manage your entire fleet expenditures in one single ledger. No more tracking down multiple expenses from every single driver and trying to make sense of it all. Car IQ’s platform provides a single source of truth for all expenses, helping you reconcile a whole lot faster than before and easily scale up with new summer hires.
- Prevent fraud
Fleet cards make it easy for drivers to commit fraud, which often looks like an employee using the card for un-approved company activity, such as purchasing fuel for their own personal vehicle. The simple truth is that every fleet experiences some degree of fraud. Most people would be shocked to know that on average, 12% of fleet payments are fraudulent. But by using dynamic authorization based on real-time vehicle data to authorize legitimate transactions and surface fraudulent ones, Car IQ provides an unmatched level of security and fraud prevention.
Streamline fleet operations this summer with Car IQ
Managing your fleet this summer doesn’t have to be a headache. At Car IQ, we use real-time vehicle data to enable payment transactions, eliminate fraud, and streamline the reconciliation process with one single ledger across your entire fleet—all without the hassles of credit cards.
Interested? Let’s start a conversion today.
