Local city and county governments usually have several different fleets to manage that all have different vehicles, employees, and fuel types. Police department, fire department, department of public works are just a few departments to name.
With so many moving parts the main challenge a city faces is keeping track of all the fuel purchases and then organizing all the fuel purchases to allocate fuel cost. It’s a big challenge, but if you get the right fuel card and setup your government fuel card account from the start, it will make your job much easier.
So let’s get started! Here are the 3 thing you need to do to in order to set up a government fuel card account from the start.
1) Account and Invoice Organization Setup
First things first, there’s three ways to organize your account.
- Set up each city department as a separate account
- Setup the city on one account and assign each department a sub account
- Set up the entire city on one account and breakdown the invoice by department
Options 1 and 2 treat each department like a completely separate company, each department is billed separately and all the online fuel card reporting is separate.
Option 3 separates each department on the fuel invoice so you can see how much each department is using, but the online fuel card reporting is set up all under one account.
2) Assign Your Fuel Cards By Using Floating Pin Setup
Floating pin setup is where you assign each vehicle a fuel card that always stays in the vehicle and every employee their own pin number that works for any card. With floating pin you’ll always know which employee is fueling which vehicle at all times.
This setup works great for government organizations because public works employees, police officers, etc. don’t always drive the same vehicle, and some vehicles can be driven by multiple employees for multiple shifts in day.
3) Setup Purchase Alerts
Purchase alerts are basically like fuel receipts that go straight to a manager’s email immediately after a driver purchases fuel. Make sure you have purchase alerts setup to go to the appropriate contacts for each department.
This will be one of the main ways you’ll catch fuel theft or fuel card misuse as it is happening.
What’s The Best Government Gas Card For My Organization?
There’s three types of fuel cards;
- Universal fuel cards
- Cardlock fuel cards
- OTR (over the road) fuel cards
Forget option 3 because OTR fuel cards don’t make sense for organizations that fuel locally.
Choosing between a cardlock fuel card and a universal fuel card all comes down to where you are located. Check out this map that will show you whether you should consider a cardlock fuel card (CFN) or a universal fuel card (Voyager).
You can also checkout how all the best fleet fuel cards match up side-by-side.
