While smart budgeting is a great way to stay ahead of fleet fuel costs and their impact on your bottom line, sometimes fuel consumption goes unnoticed and causes you to go over the fuel budget. What should you do in this case?
Fleet fuel costs are one of the largest expense categories for most businesses. But because fuel costs can be an unpredictable variable, it can be frustrating to keep expenses in line with budget expectations.
If you have experienced excess fuel consumption, despite your best efforts, this does not necessarily mean that your budget is now a lost cause. There are several things you can do to better anticipate excess fuel, offset extra money spent, and use that fuel data to better inform your fuel purchases in the future.
How to calculate fuel consumption
The simplest way to calculate fuel consumption is to take the mileage driven by each asset and divide it by the amount of fuel needed to fill the tank, then multiply that result by the cost of the fuel itself.
Fuel cost = (Distance / Consumption) × Cost per gallon
You can certainly do this calculation yourself, but there are also plenty of tools that allow you to track fuel expenses and asset usage, whether it's spreadsheets for fuel logs or automated tracking in fuel management software.
What causes excess fuel?
High prices. It can be difficult to control your fuel expenses when you can't predict how gas prices will respond to global trends. High gas prices have been a significant problem in the wake of the pandemic and the energy crisis resulting from the conflict in Ukraine, so some fleets have struggled to cope with ever-rising fuel costs.
Local availability. Much of the price of fuel depends incredibly on what is available in your area. If your fleet is based in a more rural area, you may not have the same access as other companies to competitive prices from different suppliers.
