Fuel cards – simple, aren’t they?
Used by companies to make the transactional process of buying fuel easier for fleet cars, you know that you are getting the fuel at the price you have agreed. Simple! But then, isn’t that the same concept as utilities – procure & pay? And from experience within the energy industry we all know it’s not quite that straight forward.
We have recently been working with a number of customers who are starting to raise the profile of their fuel usage within their business. But why? Well, we are seeing it is the exact same drivers that make people use a utility Bureau, namely:
- Monitor consumption
- Monitor cost
- Ensure correct tariffs are applied
- Manage suppliers
- Focus on emissions
The same principles apply to validating fuel cards as we have applied for years in validating utilities. We can interrogate the pence per unit, we can look at the mileage (consumption), we can look at patters & trends of consumption. But further to this we have been looking at specific vehicle information, such as the fuel card being matched to the right vehicle registration, filling up at weekends/out of hours and frequency of filling up. By looking at these areas we can help our customers ensure that their fuel cards are being used responsibly.
Further to checking the correct usage and cost of their fuel, there is of course the monitoring and reporting of the fuel usage. With more legislation such as the Greenhouse Gas Reporting coming into effect, the usage of fuel is becoming part of an organisation’s carbon footprint. By loading in the data of fuel usage to a Sigma database, customers are then able to report on their usage, and have this converted into emissions. A number of reports have been configured to use this data and help our clients capture a more holistic view of their carbon footprint. The reports, as per our utility reporting, can then be exported to Excel, Word or PDF to be used in wider scoping reporting requirements.
As well as the basics of capturing the fuel usage, we have also built in additional checks for transactions – such as car washing, or oil. These have proven key to customers in ensuring there is a full audit trail available.
We have been working with a number of fuel card providers on this project, and they have proven to be receptive to the concept of what we are achieving. The majority have already got the ability to provide EDI files for their billing information, which is fantastic for us as we are able to load the file as per a standard EDI utility bill.As well as being available in our Energy Bureau, this is also something that we are offering to our Support customers to have added to their Sigma database. Just contact our Support helpdesk for further information on how you can utilise this development. And for our Energy Bureau customers, this is something that can be discussed at our review meetings or directly with your contacts.
Find out more at our about service from the TEAM Energy Bureau.