Fuel cards enable employees to pay for diesel or petrol on a company car and not need to claim the money later on. Fuel cards UK are useful not only for drivers but also employers. In this guide, we explain everything you need to know about a fuel card, and also how they work and the potential advantages they could bring to your business. Read on to learn more.
What is a Fuel Card?
If you are issued with a fuel card, you will usually also be given a PIN the same way as with a credit or debit card. With the card and the PIN, it is possible to pay for the fuel of a company car at many petrol stations without using your own cash.
But not all fuel stations will accept your fuel card. Some will accept certain brands of cards but not others. You should look for the logos anytime you want to fill up and make sure your card is accepted.
When you use the card to pay for fuel, you will be prompted by an attendant to provide them with registration details for your vehicle and they will issue you with a receipt. Your company will be sent the bill and you don’t have to collect the receipt and send it for reimbursement.
A fuel card even lets you claim loyalty points. This means that you as an employee are eligible to gain benefits from member fuel stations and use them later on rewards.
How do fuel cards work for business owners?
If you are a business owner, fuel cards UK can be beneficial to you whether you have a small, large, or medium company. Some of the advantages that you can expect from joining a card program include significant savings on your fuel costs, getting HMRC-compliant invoices, and having the ability to access real-time data about your fuel spend any time and from anywhere.
You can also opt for fuel cards that have fixed-price weekly systems, in which you are charged a fixed amount per liter of fuel in one week, and not the fluctuating pump rates. This is especially advantageous if your employees are used to filling up at high-end stations such as motorway services. In the end, it will help you control costs.
Also, fuel cards let businesses record mileage on each vehicle on their fleet. When a pump attendant asks employees for a registration number, they may also ask them to supply the mileage figure. It enables you to easily keep track of your fleet. Also, it enables employees to keep tabs on their mileage overtime through keeping organized receipts.
You are also able to monitor the fuel expenses of your employees. You can see things like the amount they spent, the location for each fill-up, vehicle registration, and the mileage. With these abilities, you can reign in on fuel fraud significantly.
How does a Fuel Card Help You Control fuel spend?
Fuel cards have enormous advantages. They give you crucial insights about your employees you never had before. These include mileages, spending patterns, fuel economy, operational efficiency, and usage.
However, it’s vital that the management and the guys tasked with issuing fuel cards understand their work in the implementation.
It makes no sense to introduce cards and put in place rules to govern the purchasing behavior if your line managers cannot enforce them or if the drivers will not follow them. therefore, there is a need to ensure that everybody understands their responsibility, and what you expect of them regarding what they can buy with them or who is authorized to use the cards.
You could also set up various reporting alerts, like drivers fueling a certain number of times only per day, or not fueling up outside normal work hours. The best fuel cards UK businesses want to join are those offering
24/7 online account management, plus a reporting dashboard to enable you to track purchasing.
Doing this coupled with working closely with your supplier enables you to set realistic targets and goals in terms of efficiencies. You can then review these regularly against historic records and this data. It enables you to know that you are headed on the right path by tracking data and also taking into account
- Employee spend
- VAT charges
- Spend by department
- Mileage
- Vehicle economy
What type of Fuel Card do I need access to?
When it comes to refueling vehicles, there is a raft of options at your disposal. The support you require will depend on the manner in which your fleet operates.
If, for example, your business has a fleet of vehicles that ply over the country, with no specific journey patterns, you will be best served by a card that gives you widespread access to petrol stations, as well as a big coterie of suppliers’ ad brands.
While many cards are offering this, at the same time, you should know that giving your drivers a free pass to fuel anywhere could translate to higher costs.
You could also set up controls to stop your drivers from fueling at dearer stations, for example, motorway service stations.
But before you put in place such controls, it is critical to understand your drivers’ needs first. It could be that banning drivers from filling up at motorway stations inadvertently makes them drive for long looking for cheaper fuel when filling up and proceeding with their journey would have saved time. Also, using a card brings down the motorway prices anyway because it offers discounts.
Another critical factor is location. If your fleet mainly operates in urban areas, you could go for a card that gives you access to cheap supermarket fuel. This way, you will end up saving more money because these sites are easily accessible in major towns and cities.
Alternatively, if you have depots or compounds from which your employees work or regular routes they ply, then wholesale purchasing or bunkering from a few suppliers could lead to significant savings.
Conclusion
Fuel cards bring innumerable benefits to businesses both large and small. For drivers, fuel cards eliminate the need to keep receipts to later file claims for the money they used to pay for fuel. For employers, the benefits include savings on fuel, fewer administrative tasks, and HMRC-compliant invoices. Whichever way you look at it, a fuel card is an invention that businesses should join at the earliest opportunity.
