Everything You Need to Know About CFN Card Controls

With over 57,000 sites open 24/7, CFN has no shortage of fueling options that your business can take advantage of. However, it is important to make sure that your business isn’t taken advantage of in the process.  

This is where controls come in. Controls are features offered with your CFN card that allow you to ensure that your CFN card is being used for the right reason at the right times in the right places. Without controls, CFN cards can be improperly used and can cost your company thousands.

CFN offers a variety of card controls so that you can pick and choose what best fits your company’s unique set of needs.

Personal Profiles are a simple, easy way to ensure that cards aren’t misused by both those  inside and outside of the company. Perhaps the most widely used control, personal profiles grant each driver a PIN # unique to the CFN card so that it is rendered useless to other employees as well as people outside your company who may have cause to use it i.e. family members.

Limiting the number of transactions a card can authorize per day is another simple and easy way to control fuel card misuse. In doing so you are able to perfectly match the card’s utility with the amount of times it needs to be used, ensuring that it is not used improperly by people inside and outside of the company for personal use.

By doing this, limiting transactions per day acts as a nice compliment to the personal profiles control. However in order to successfully take advantage of this limit, it is necessary that the number of transactions is consistent and predictable for each day of the week.

Building on the control that limiting transactions offers, gallon limits ensure that not only the card but that the transaction also isn’t being misused. For instance, without this control one of your card holders could buy gas for everyone at the station without limit and all under just one transaction. So it is not uncommon to find companies using both gallon and transaction limits because they together control for the card and the use of it.

However, it’s crucial that the number of gallons each driver uses each day is known at least approximately before enacting this control so that drivers aren’t stranded on their routes. The best way to do this is get the tank capacity of the vehicle that the driver operates and set the gallon limit accordingly.

Continuing to build upon the controls that gallons and transactions guarantee, controlling the time of day and the day of the week further ensures that your CFN cards are being used during operation hours. With this control, your drivers will only be able to buy in the timeframes that you want to i.e. during normal operating hours of 8-5, Monday-Friday.

However, just like the previous two controls, it important to structure your time frames in a way so that driver’s working overtime or running late are still able to fuel. So if you’re a 24/7 trucking company, than this control probably isn’t the one for you.

Serving as both a control and a safety measure, product control makes sure that your driver is filling your truck with the right fuel and only the right fuel. With this control, you are granted the capability to limit your card’s buying power to say just diesel as an example while disallowing all of the others that your vehicles don’t use.

This prohibits drivers from fueling a truck with the wrong fuel, thereby damaging the vehicle, and from fueling a vehicle that takes a different fuel that may not be company property. However, this control is only active at CFN sites and therefore cannot control for card use at FleetWide retail stations.

With this control, employers assign fuel cards to trucks rather than to individual drivers to ensure that the trucks are being properly fueled no matter who’s driving it. It’s a fairly common practice for a company where drivers switch vehicles often, especially fleets that operate 24/7, who have 3 different shifts of drivers driving one truck. This way, the company can place their say 20-30 drivers into a rotation that keeps their 10 or so trucks always moving day after day.

With so many drivers, as well as trucks, an employer would have a lot to sort through when determining who was improperly fueling what truck at any given time but with floating driver ID’s this process becomes wonderfully simple. Controlling for both truck and driver, Floating ID’s allow an employer to know who was driving what truck because the card is specific to the truck and the driver is specific to the PIN.

Finally, CFN offers an email receipt service so that you can keep track of your company’s fuel purchases  as as oversee the execution of what other controls you’ve chosen to enact with email notifications sending with each transaction.

Now that all of CFN’s controls have been explained let’s look into how to best get started applying them to your company’s day to day fueling activities.

The best way to start enacting controls onto your company’s CFN fuel cards is to call your CFN card provider and select your chosen controls over the phone. This is also the best way to deactivate a card, delete a driver ID or remove or add a control as well. Quick and efficient, your CFN card provider has online access to your cards controls and can have all of your needs met and activated before you hang up the phone. 

Another option is to download a fuel card set-up form and get an idea of how to better implement and organize your controls from there.