Fuel Theft is Higher as Fleet Fueling Raises

With truck drivers running around and fleet fueling pricing raising, fuel theft should not be a surprise. Some companies are well aware of the problem and others aren’t. It take solid fleet fuel card controls and fuel audits to truly know if your company can be getting hurt by diesel fuel theft.

We your driver has your company fuel card, a lot of damage can be done to a company’s piggy bank if you don’t have proper fueling controls in place. We could tell you hundreds of stories in add diesel fuel cost because no one or team of people were closing watching all of the fuel transactions.

If your company buys its diesel fuel over the road, you probably use some type of fuel card or fleet credit card. These fleet fuel cards have controls but you has the fleet have to put them in place and adjust them.

If you have a bulk fuel tank that doesn’t have a card system and your drivers are writing down how many gallons go into there truck, good luck with that.

This goes for just about anything but this phrase always sticks in my head, “They don’t respect, what you don’t inspect.

Let’s look at a companies money being suck out the fuel system call theft. A normal truck could guzzle up to 1500 gallons a month, if you miss 1% of that, its 15 gallons on average, per truck.

With diesel fuel prices and gas prices at their highest in several months over $4.00, you could lose $60.00 a month, for every truck. If you have a 100- truck fleet, you’re losing $6,000 a month or $72,000 a year

Usually fuel frauds is more than 1%, Some people put that number at more than 2%. I would say based on what we have seen during fleet fueling audits the real number might be 3% on average, with some companies higher still.

In this type of economy, companies cannot afford to lose that much profits a month. There is one leading solution companies of all sizes are investing in, this is having a fuel management company take a look at the transaction lists for the company fuel cards.

Consider that $72,000 dollar at 1% is really 2%, $144,000 or 3%, $216,000. That is a whole lot of diesel fuel.

As diesel fuel prices get higher, fuel theft increases because there is more money to be made. They are still stealing the same amount of gallons but for a lot higher price.

Most companies best defence is a good fuel management or fleet management. A team of people reviewing fuel transactions with a very active fleet manager or fuel manager to make sure you are not losing any money because of fleet fueling fraud or diesel fuel theft.

Of course for most companies time is not on their side. There are many tasks that need to be covered during the day to keep operations running smooth and customers happy.

You could outsource your fuel department. Companies outsource fleet management and repairs all of the time. They outsource driver compliance logs, IFTA filings and many other items. Some people might not even consider to be outsourced for these services, they would look at it as strategically sourced to a firm that knows more than they do and their company can focus on what it does best.

So strategically source your fuel department, after all when you have trucks there isn’t to many things more important then your fleet fuel, right. If you don’t have a fuel expert, why struggle. Not to mention the lack of endless headaches suffered when you have to deal with these fuel fraud cases alone and with no support.

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