Containing your fleet’s fuel expenses is critical to staying on budget. That means optimizing routes, curbing excessive idling and hard acceleration and keeping vehicles well maintained. It also means monitoring for fuel card fraud.
Chances are, most of your drivers are honest. But fuel card fraud is real. When employees with a card such as the WEX fuel card share it with friends or family members or use it to fill up unauthorized vehicles, your organization pays the price.
Transaction data reports from your fuel card company provide important basics: date and time of purchases, the price and the fuel type. Some reports even highlight high-price purchases, purchases that exceed the vehicle’s tank capacity and other potential red flags., But the telematics-based fleet management solution you use to manage your fleet every day can add an extra layer of information that ties in vehicle location. In addition, monitoring your fuel card usage in the same place you monitor other fleet data can potentially save you a step and put a few minutes back into your day.
CalAmp application fuel card reports
Users of CalAmp's application, which integrates with WEX fuel card data via an API, can easily view fuel purchase reports when they view other fleet management reports. CalAmp's application matches the fuel card used with the associated vehicle to flag discrepancies such as mismatches between the vehicle and the amount or type of fuel purchased. It also flags discrepancies between where the purchase was made and the location of the vehicle at the time of purchase. If the authorized vehicle was miles from the gas station where the card was used, you may have an issue.
Managing by exception
All of these discrepancies can be viewed at a glance by creating and scheduling a fuel card exception report from CalAmp's application dashboard. Exception reports filter out the noise and show you only outlier data points that point to a potential problem. Managing by exception allows you to prioritize and focus on the data that requires more urgent action.
One of the very first CalAmp customers to use the WEX fuel card integration uncovered fuel card fraud with the first exception report they ran.
View your fuel card exception reports when you view your other exception reports, such as device communication and unauthorized vehicle usage. Add long idle, speeding and hard acceleration exception reports to identify drivers with a bad habit of wasting fuel.
More fuel savings through telematics
CalAmp fuel card reports provide other useful insights that can help you manage your fleet’s fuel spend. For example, you can get a summary of all fuel purchases over a certain date range, or track fuel spending trends for each driver.
A fleet management solution such as CalAmp also allows you to ensure that employees are purchasing fuel at approved stations. Do this by setting up geofences around gas stations that are approved for use and/or those that are not approved for use. If an employee fuels up at a station that’s not on the approved vendor list, you can choose to get a geofence alert or view these exceptions in a geofence exception report.
For most fleets, fuel is the number one operating cost. Successfully managing that spend is critical to protecting the bottom line. A fleet management solution that offers seamless fuel card integration helps you monitor fuel card usage, keep employees accountable and save your organization money.
For help setting up your fuel card and other CalAmp application integrations, visit our website.