To run a safe, productive, and profitable business, physical economy leaders need full visibility into all facets of their operations. Motive’s recent Physical Economy Outlook report discovered that many companies struggle to achieve this comprehensive view due to fragmented data and disparate tools. One in three leaders said they lack the visibility necessary to perform their roles effectively, and many attributed this challenge to outdated tools and multiple systems, which complicates data management and drains resources on manual activities.
There is one area of operations in particular where leaders say they consistently over-invest valuable resources on laborious manual tasks — Spend Management. Spend Management refers to the controlling, optimizing, and monitoring of fleet-related expenses and often relies on tools like fleet cards and reporting systems. However, not all Spend Management solutions are efficient. Many leaders find their teams spending countless hours on expense tracking, spend reporting, and legally required IFTA reporting. Additionally, significant time is lost dealing with frequent phone calls from drivers trying to resolve fleet card problems. To overcome these issues, leaders are now seeking solutions that pull their spend and fleet management together into a single system.
A single view of data and reporting
Most physical economy leaders have a fleet management platform they use to monitor and improve the safety and operations of their vehicles, like Motive. By using a fleet card that allows spend to be managed from that same platform, teams gain a single view of all their data and reporting in one system. This allows for accurate, quick, and efficient Spend Management, reducing hours previously spent piecing together data and performing match-backs and reconciliations across different systems.
Time savings also apply to IFTA reporting. By centralizing all fuel spend in a single system, filing IFTA reports, which previously took hours, can now be completed in seconds.
Productivity savings mount up
Having spend and fleet management sit within the same platform also allows for granular fleet card spend controls that help leaders reduce spend and even prevent fraud. Not only that, but the single system provides drivers with visibility into their spend limits, fleet card decline reasons, and other fleet card-related settings, empowering them to resolve many fleet card issues independently and reducing the need for office staff to troubleshoot.
With fleet and spend under one roof, reporting and expense tracking is simplified and the burden on office staff is reduced, ultimately driving greater productivity and profitability. To find out more about Motive’s fleet card and spend management capabilities visit gomotive.com/products/motive-card.
