Daily Archives: May 17, 2014

2 in 5 Fleet Owners Suspect Fuel Invoice Errors. What About the Other 3?

A recent article over on TruckingInfo that wanted to know if you are Staying On Top of Your Fuel Invoices noted that only 40% of respondents to a recent survey by FuelQuest suspected errors in their fuel invoices. SI’s question is, what about the other 60%?

According to the article, unaddressed, bulk fuel invoice error rates tend to hover around 25%, but some companies have rates as high as 55%. This is due to complex fuel and freight contracts as well as manual or sample-based reconciliation processes. This is because they lack the processes and technologies to insure complete, consistent, and effective invoice matching and review.

Furthermore, the lack of proper processes and technologies results in the business impact from invoicing errors including overpayments, increased operational costs, and lost trust in suppliers being significantly underestimated. If a large fleet company is consistently being over billed 3 cents/gallon, that’s up to $12 of over-billing on every fill up and up to $2,000 a year of over-billing for every 18 wheeler (with an older model getting an average of only 5 mpg). If you have 50 trucks in your fleet, that’s an over-billing at a rate of 100K/year until it is detected. And how much will be recovered?

Even if you are a 3PL/Logistics Carrier you need end-to-end invoice automation, m-way matching, and exception-based management. Otherwise, you don’t know how much money is being needlessly burned by your fleet.