EMPLOYEE Car Ownership Schemes. Or, in its abbreviated form, ECOS.
If you’ve not had a chance to read Brian Rogerson’s thoughtful piece on ECOS, then I suggest it’s worth a read – ECOS: a different way to finance business cars.
ECOS might seem the ideal way to restructure your company’s business cars. Get them off your books; staff lease their own vehicles; and through a balance of car mileage allowances, tax benefits and so on, there are plenty of cost and administration savings to be made.
Finance product puts cars in staff hands
Which sounds great.
But in my opinion they are absolutely the wrong thing for a small business. To operate effectively, and make the cost savings, you need to have a fleet of some 300 cars to make it worthwhile. If you have a fleet of 300 company cars, then you’re not a small business.
Leasing company Alphabet is one of the leaders in the market for providing ECOS to companies. It does contract hire and other financial products too, but ECOS are its speciality.
However, to give you some idea of the scale you need to be in order for Alphabet to consider you, for contract hire their minimum car requirement is 25 company cars. For ECOS, Alphabet supplies schemes to such as the BBC; McDonald’s Restaurants; and Oracle. Massive companies where the sophistication of the product, and the cost and tax savings are sufficient to make it worthwhile.
Martin Brown from Fleet Alliance is absolutely right in his comment on the article. ECOS are for big companies. Go to your business car solutions provider, such as Fleet Alliance, or your car leasing broker, and ask about setting up a cash for car scheme. And preferably a scheme that gives you some say over the vehicles the staff choose. You’ll get a much better solution that way. And forget about ECOS for your small business.
