Fleet administration in Excel: what does it really cost?

Fleet administration kept in Excel seems free, but in reality it costs money in three places: the working time spent on it (typically 3–10 hours per week, depending on fleet size), the consequences of missed deadlines (loss of warranty, fines, vehicles out of service) and poor decisions based on inaccurate or missing data. An automated fleet management system replaces all three.

1. Working time. The logbook, trip records, odometer records, the service spreadsheet and the month-end summary typically take up several hours of a colleague's week — 3–10 hours per week, depending on fleet size. That is several hundred thousand forints (HUF) a year in wage costs spent on administration rather than productive work.

2. Missed deadlines. Excel does not warn you. If the person responsible is on holiday or skips a row, the roadworthiness test, the insurance or the service required as a warranty condition quietly expires. A single loss of warranty is typically a greater loss than the annual fee of a fleet management system.

3. Bad data. Decisions — replacement, settlement, rewards — based on odometer readings reported verbally, estimated fuel consumption and machine hours totalled on paper are only as good as the data. And in a dispute, Excel is not evidence.

In FleetControl, the data is generated automatically: the logbook, trip records and odometer log are produced from CAN+GPS data, the system warns you about expiries by email, reports arrive automatically, and a driver's fault report becomes a ticket. Maintaining the Excel spreadsheet as a task disappears.