Whether you have a team of salespeople with their own company cars or a fleet of vans your employees use to travel to and from jobs, diesel and petrol costs are one of the biggest outgoings for many businesses. Fuel cards are a great way to regain control over your spend and bring a whole range of unexpected benefits to your company.
Whether you're a small business owner or a fleet manager, find out about the advantages of adding fuel cards to your armoury.
What fuel card benefits can businesses achieve?
The advantages of using fuel cards
Fuel cards offer benefits such as fuel cost savings through discounts, better control over fuel expenses with detailed reporting, reduced administrative tasks with centralised billing, enhanced security features such as PIN codes and the convenience of access to a wide network of fuel stations.
To keep your business moving, your employees need to be able to fuel their cars, vans or other vehicles easily. Even with the best expenses system, keeping an eye on all your team’s petrol and diesel purchases can involve lots of time, effort and VAT receipts. With business fuel cards, fuel buying, management and monitoring becomes a whole lot easier.
Makes fuel cost management easy
As one of your business’s biggest outgoings, keeping track of your fuel costs is key to maintaining your cash flow and profit margins. So not knowing how much you’re going to spend on your fuel before each employee’s expenses are submitted at the end of the month can play havoc with your cash flow.
Each fuel card you issue to your team is connected to the same monitoring system. By being able to see all the diesel and petrol purchases they’ve made in one place, you can start to predict your outgoings more accurately, making budgeting and forecasting much more straightforward. You can also set account limits on your spending, giving you peace of mind knowing you’ll never go over budget.
Gives greater control over fuel expenses
Say goodbye to paper receipts! Simply by logging in to an online monitoring system, you can see exactly what’s been spent on each fuel card. By connecting these cards to a specific vehicle or employee, you can break down these expenses even further without needing to wait for individual employees to submit their expenses forms. HMRC approved VAT receipts are also available to download directly from the system, cutting down your admin time and making fuel cost claims a whole lot easier.
Enables accurate fuel usage monitoring
Ensuring your fleet is running efficiently helps keep your fuel costs down and helps you manage your carbon impact. With the fuel card monitoring system, you can easily pull reports on your fleet’s performance and make optimisations to its efficiency.
For example, by choosing to collect mileage with your fuel card, you can calculate each vehicle’s MPG rate and see if one of your vans or cars isn’t performing as efficiently as others or whether a particular driver is using more fuel. You can then work to correct this by bringing a vehicle in for maintenance or giving a driver extra training. In short, you can actively manage your fleet’s fuel economy, minimising your costs and carbon impact.
Purchasing fuel is easy and secure
From issuing business credit cards to giving your employees cash, different fuel purchasing methods present their own security challenges. From your employees becoming the victim of theft to your business fuel budget being subject to fraud, fuel cards offer a more secure alternative, without sacrificing any fuel purchasing flexibility.
By giving each employee their own fuel card they can pull up at any station on the provider's network and purchase their petrol or diesel easily. Plus, the cards can only be used for fuel transactions, so you don’t need to worry about your business’s money being spent in fraudulent ways.
Saves money on fuel purchases
Our fuel card benefits give business drivers access to great value pump prices at more than 1,350 conveniently located Tesco, Morrisons and Sainsbury's forecourts and 900 of the 1,100 Shell petrol station network. fuelGenie, our supermarket fuel card solution, enables your drivers to consistently buy fuel at an average of 3p per litre* less than the national forecourt average, meaning the savings soon add up. If your business needs the added convenience of a larger network, you can also choose our fuelGenie+ fuel card, that gives access to most Shell stations.
Benefits of a fuel card for large companies
Whether each team has their own method for purchasing fuel or you’re struggling to keep track of each employee’s monthly expenses, using fuel cards helps you to consolidate, monitor and manage your business’s fuel expenditure more easily. Through an online system, you can track each employee’s fuel purchases, examine every vehicle’s MPG and get all your VAT receipts in one place. This means you can actively monitor and manage your fleet’s fuel economy, helping you save money.
Fuel cards benefits for small businesses
Even if you only have a few employees with company cars or are self-employed with your own van, fuel spending can soon start to add up as you and your team travel between jobs and clients. Fuel cards for small businesses can help you manage these costs, set limits and forecast your spending to help you keep tighter control over your bottom line. And with all your VAT receipts and purchase records in one monitoring system, you’ll save a whole lot of admin time when it comes to making claims on your tax return as well as enjoying a host of fuel card benefits.
What benefits do fuelGenie fuel cards offer?
fuelGenie prides itself on being a trusted provider that gives its customers fuel card benefits, including:
- No account and card fees or hidden surcharges, and there’s no limit on how many fuelGenie cards you can add to your account.
- Low-cost supermarket fuel prices, currently saving our customers an average of 3p per litre* compared to the national average cost.
- Get more locations and a few added extras for a small monthly card fee with fuelGenie+
- Save admin time with easy VAT reclaim thanks to our single digital HMRC-approved invoice.
- Complete control with online or in-app account management, giving you 24/7 visibility on driver fuel spending.
- The ability for drivers to collect supermarket loyalty points on Tesco Clubcard, Morrisons More and Nectar cards at Sainsbury’s.
- Locating the nearest petrol station easily with the fuelGenie app.
What other benefits of business fuel cards are there compared to traditional payment methods?
Fuel cards offer enhanced security features compared to traditional payment methods. These include PIN protection, card lock capabilities, real-time monitoring for suspicious activity and the ability to restrict card usage to fuel-only purchases, reducing the risk of unauthorised transactions and fuel theft.
By combining the benefits of flexible purchasing, easy monitoring and real savings, fuelGenie is trusted by businesses of a range of sectors and sizes to make their fuel management easier. Plus, applying for an account couldn’t be more straightforward. Simply fill out our online form and you could soon be saving your business time and money and enjoying all the fuel card benefits that come with it.
*The 3 pence per litre saving message is based on the difference between the published Government Weekly diesel fuel pump prices and the diesel pump price (inc. taxes) paid per litre for diesel by fuelGenie customers for the comparable period. During 2020 fuelGenie customers buying diesel at Tesco, Morrisons and Sainsbury’s saved an average of 4.7 pence per litre when compared to the Government Weekly road fuel prices.
