THE COST of fuel is increasing at a heady rate adding to the expense of business car motoring.

Yet it costs even more than the money you pay at the pumps, says fuel card supplier TOTALCard, because of the additional wasted admin and paperwork spent on manually processing fuel claims. A recent study by TOTALCard found some 52% of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) administered their business car fuel expenses this way.

Meanwhile one in six business car managers cited fuel as a key operational cost, but were not taking action to control and monitor the fuel expenditure incurred by their business cars.

TOTALCard said that one in five of the SMEs surveyed believed they did not need to use a fuel card. And a further 20% believed the number of their business cars was too few to realise any benefits on the bottom line.

Eric Fanchini, card services manager at Total, commented: “Fuel cards are designed to help monitor expenses by measuring vehicle performance, but our research shows that business car managers are not exploiting these benefits by using one for their company cars.”

For those businesses having to meet carbon reduction targets, Mr Fanchini added: “We have launched TOTALCard Green, which helps businesses track and ultimately reduce the CO2 emissions of their company cars by measuring vehicle performance.”

Included with TOTALCard Green, said Mr Fanchini, was a supporting web package that provided business car managers with online card management and e-billing. It also allowed monitoring of miles per gallon and product usage to enable SMEs to track and reduce expenditure where relevant.

Small businesses waste money on fuel expenses