The Real Way To Save Money Using A Universal Fleet Card

Let’s cut right to the chase, people are interested in fleet cards to save money. Or at least 99.9% of people are (not based on an actual study). You are even probably reading this article because you want to learn how to save money with a universal fleet card.

So here’s the big secret, the main way you are going to save money with a universal fleet card is NOT rebates, discounts, rewards, etc..

I know what you’re thinking, “What?” That’s probably what you’re looking for and it’s probably what you have seen advertised in junk mail, spam, internet ads etc.. I work for a fuel card company and other fuel card companies still send me mail on how I can get a huge discount at the pump.

To be honest, the discounts, rebates, etc. rarely turn out to be what they seem. For example, you might see an ad that says you can get 5¢ per gallon off, but then you read the fine print and realize the discount only works for the first month.

Or worse yet, you get a discount only to find out that you pay as much or more in transaction fees, card fees, finance charges etc..

So what’s the real secret behind saving your company money with a universal fleet card?

Not to think the worst of drivers because most drivers are honest hard working employees, but every company that has been doing business for a while has probably dealt with some type of employee theft. So it’s important to have control over your fuel purchases.

Unlike company credit cards, fleet cards only allow drivers to purchase fuel or maintenance items if you allow them to. You can also setup time frame limits (8am-5pm mon-fri), dollar per transaction limits, transaction per day limits, etc. that allow your drivers to only purchase fuel when you want them to.

You can even take it a step further and set up automatic email purchase alerts that alert you with the date, time, place, and amount of every transaction as soon as the driver hangs up the nozzle.

These controls will immediately stop or at least catch any fuel theft as it it happening so you can take the appropriate actions to eliminate costly fuel theft and card misuse.

If you have someone who is collecting fuel receipts and entering them into a spreadsheet to create monthly fuel expense reports, IFTA reports, etc. it’s probably taking a considerable amount of time and work.

Fuel cards collect data at the pump which creates reports such as expense reports that you can run for any given time period (weekly, monthly, quarterly, date range, etc.). These reports collect every transaction so you don’t have to ever collect a receipt again.

Some fleet cards even have a report that is made for filing your quarterly IFTA reports.

Unlike brand specific truck stop fuel cards or local fuel network cards that work at only select locations, universal fleet cards are made to purchase fuel almost anywhere a credit card is accepted. This network flexibility will help you reduce fuel expenses in two ways.

The first is that since you can use a universal fleet card almost anywhere, you can choose the lowest price in the area. This is huge because some stations in a given area can differ in price by up to 50¢ per gallon.

Second is that your drivers will never have to drive around looking for stations that accept the fuel card. This waste both driver labor time and fuel.