More and more businesses are looking for ways of saving money and spreading the cost of their expenses in order to make weekly, monthly and annual cash flow more manageable. One area that has seen a big rise in recent years is the use of business fuel cards, as more fleet managers are becoming aware of fuel card benefits.

So what are the benefits of fuel cards?

Using fuel cards can provide huge benefits to businesses that use vehicles on a daily basis. Operating fleets requires seamless organisation and efficiency and using fuel cards facilitates easier management of those requirements.

This blog post takes a closer look at why a business should be using fuel cards as a helpful tool to streamline manual processes and provide fleet managers, drivers and businesses owners with more freedom to get on with the job they were hired for.

Just some of the benefits of fuel cards are as follows:

• A quick and convenient way to pay for fuel
• Increased security and a safer alternative to carrying cash
• Tighter control of business expenses
• Streamline mundane admin processes
• Increased flexibility for refuelling across a huge network

Of course, there is a range of fuel cards available on the market and for your business to truly benefit from investing in fuel cards, you need to choose the right one that is tailored to your individual businesses requirements.

Now, let’s explore those fuel card benefits in more detail so you can find the fuel card which is best suited to your fleet.

Extra Convenience for Your Fleet

When time is money, one goal most successful businesses share is becoming as time-efficient as possible. Fuel cards help achieve this goal as they are a quick and convenient way for employees to pay for fuel.

When you've got places to be and deadlines to meet, why waste time withdrawing cash or hanging around at checkout queues for VAT receipts? With a fuel card, your drivers can pay at the pump and get on the road without worrying about their payment method. Discover the top ways a fuel card saves time in our recent post.

Increased Security for Your Peace of Mind

Keeping your business secure is crucial, whether that’s by extending a duty of care to your employees or protecting your business from fraud. Assigning fuel cards to your drivers is a much safer alternative to carrying cash. This is because they bypass the need to carry large amounts of cash while on the road and this keeps them safe from being an obvious target of theft or assault.

Fuel cards can also help eliminate any fraudulent transactions where expenses are being claimed that aren’t necessarily used for company purposes by fleet drivers. Although it's rare, there have been occasions where fleet members

Business Savings that Make a Difference

One of the major benefits of fuel cards over cash is that, depending on your card features, your business can make fuel savings with a fuel card by getting a consistent price per litre that is often cheaper than the varying costs between stations. Although price fluctuations are inevitable, fuel cards can help you control the costs of your business expenses by giving you insight into how much fuel each driver is using.

This is a great way of finding out how and where you can make cutbacks or improve efficiency for longer-term business savings. For example, if you can spot patterns which correlate to fuel savings or you notice one vehicle is making lots of inefficient short journeys, you can bear this in mind for future planning.

Easier Organisation with Streamlined Admin

Every business manager knows how much time admin consumes. With traditional methods of purchasing fuel comes the hassle of collecting receipts, claiming expenses and dealing with HMRC. Fuel cards let you skip a lot of the process with their account management services.

By registering purchases (no more receipts needed) and issuing HMRC-approved invoices, fuel card account management offers consolidated invoices on a weekly or monthly basis. This means hundreds of individual transactions are compiled into one neat invoice instead of manually trying to wrangle multiple documents into one tidy and readable report.

Increased Flexibility for Your Drivers

Using fuel cards gives business fleets more flexibility for refuelling across a huge network. Sometimes plans and routes change and the ability to use a fuel card across networks gives your drivers the freedom to adjust their route as necessary. You can find out more about our fleet fuel cards in our recent blog post. Fuelmate offers a large choice of networks from leading brands, such as BP, Shell, Esso and UK Fuels so you can decide which networks you wish to include on your business account. The garage locator tool also allows drivers to find their nearest fuel station, wherever they are, even if they change course to avoid traffic on their planned route.

With our fuel card solutions, we can find the right card for your drivers’ routines, whether used locally or nationally, providing your organisation with more freedom and the added peace of mind that you can send drivers anywhere and they can refuel without any hassle or worry.

If you think your business may benefit from using fuel cards, why not try our easy to use fuel card comparison tool? Or, read our complete guide to fuel cards to find out more.