Are you still handing out cash to your drivers, making them cash in at the end of every day and turn in their receipts for fuel purchases? Or do you issue fuel cardsand then have to ask for receipts to ensure they aren’t using the cards for unauthorized purchases, such as buying snacks from a fueling station’s convenience store? These are a couple of the biggest risks of managing a fleet of vehicles.

Luckily, there is a better and easier way to do things. Fleet cards make a great tool to help you manage your fleet. In addition to creating detailed reports on the purchases made on each card, these cards enable you to set limits on the purchases made with the cards, in order to prevent unauthorized purchases.

One of the most common and most serious losses that fleet managers have to deal with is from unauthorized purchases. These can be as minor as not buying fuel from one of your preferred stations, thereby cutting into your budget by causing you to pay too much for fuel. Some business fuel cards offer discounts or rebates for bulk fuel purchases, so a driver who regularly fills their tank at a different station may be losing more than just a couple of pennies per gallon. You may also deal with issues of a more serious nature, such as your drivers using the company credit card to fill up the tank on their personal vehicles, or using their cash or company card to buy themselves lunch, cigarettes, or snacks.

Fleet cards all but eliminate these issues by allowing you to set purchase limits. Your limits can be as strict or as lenient as you like. For instance, you can simply limit purchases made on the card to fuel and maintenance. That way, if an employee tries to charge a convenience store purchase to the card, it will be denied.

If you want tighter restrictions, on the other hand, you can set a cap on how much a driver can spend per day on their card. Usually the idea is to assign a separate card to each vehicle, so that you can closely monitor the truck’s fuel consumption and keep tabs on maintenance. This enables you to ensure each vehicle is always in tiptop shape, of course, but it also allows you to set daily purchase limits for each individual vehicle. This means that you can give a truck that is usually assigned to the long-distance routes a higher purchase limit, while keeping the in-town trucks, or the more fuel-efficient vehicles, at a lower purchase limit.

There are other ways that fleet cards can save money and help you stick to your fuel budget, but one of the biggest advantages is the ability to better control your drivers’ purchases. No more cash unaccounted for, or mystery purchases on the company credit card. From now on, you know exactly what your drivers are buying, and have the ability to make sure that they don’t buy anything they are not supposed to.

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