Driving up Costs: Costs to Consider for Your Business’ Fleet

Without a doubt, the vehicles your company utilizes allow your employees to be more productive and your business to have a wider reach. At the same time, vehicles come with costs, whether you own one vehicle or a large fleet. Understanding these costs in advance, particularly hidden costs that you may not expect, will ensure you’re able to manage these costs more effectively and utilize your fleet more efficiently. Here are a few costs you may not immediately think of when building a corporate fleet.

Keeping It Clean

The moment your company’s vehicles leave company property, they are a moving billboard for your business. This means that you need to control the message those moving billboards convey. One way to ensure a positive message is communicated is to maintain a sparkling clean fleet, as dirty and dingy vehicles can only tarnish your business’s reputation and erode your customers’ trust. Since it’s unlikely that anyone within your company has the title of “car washer,” you’ll want to set aside money for having the vehicles regularly washed by a third party.

Replacement Parts

With any vehicle, it’s understood that normal maintenance, such as changing the oil, rotating the tires, and topping off the windshield wiper fluid, is a normal part of the cost of ownership. What you may not immediately think to budget for, however, are replacement parts for your vehicles as the current parts become broken or worn out. For example, windshields are exposed to a lot of wear and tear, necessitating repair or replacement on a semi-regular basis. This means you need to budget to have an auto glass repair service properly restore or replace the windshields on your business’s fleet to ensure top-notch employee safety.

Tickets

With so many people driving so many miles on a regular basis, it’s almost assured that at some point, someone will be caught making a mistake while driving and be given a ticket. You need to decide, in advance, how to handle these issues to ensure they don’t become an overwhelming expense. Tickets themselves are expensive enough, then you add in higher insurance rates, and a simple mistake can lead to a lot of expense for your company. It’s important to have a written policy describing what will take place in these instances to ensure that everyone understands just who is responsible for paying these costs.

Constant Evaluation

Since owning and maintaining a fleet can be one of your business’s biggest expenses, it’s important to constantly evaluate the efficiency of the fleet and the vendors you use to provide necessary vehicle services. This ensures you are always getting the most value for your money, allowing you to increase your margins and grow your business even further.