This guide is for you if the fleet landed on your desk on top of your own job, if your fleet outgrew what a spreadsheet can hold, or if your management asks for a figure you cannot produce.
Chapter 1Laying down the inventory
Everything starts with one line per vehicle, and only one. As long as two files describe the same fleet, no figure you produce can be defended in a meeting.
What a vehicle record must carry
| Family | Information |
|---|---|
| Identity | Registration, VIN, make, model, version, first registration, energy, CO2 emissions |
| Ownership | Owned or leased, lessor, start and end dates, contractual mileage, monthly payment, months remaining |
| Assignment | Driver or shared vehicle, site, dates of entry and exit from the fleet |
| Condition | Odometer reading and its date, last service, next roadworthiness test |
The registration is the natural identifier: it is the only piece of data the garage, the insurer, the administration and the driver all use without getting it wrong. Build everything around it.
The three most expensive mistakes
- The ghost vehicle. Returned or sold, never removed from the file, still carrying insurance and a budget line.
- The undated odometer reading. A reading without its date is worth nothing: no usage rate can be derived from it, so no end-of-contract projection.
- The duplicate driver. Two spellings of the same name, and the history of fines splits in two.
Go furtherThe French vehicle fleet·The odometer and mileage readings
Chapter 2Understanding what a vehicle costs
Total cost of ownership adds up everything a vehicle consumes while it is with you: ownership, energy, servicing and tyres, insurance and claims, taxation, indirect costs — and, when bought, the residual value comes off.
TCO divided by the kilometres covered gives the cost per kilometre. That is the figure that lets you compare two vehicles, two sites, two ownership models — and the one your finance department will understand without explanation.
The trap of the average
An average cost per kilometre across the whole fleet hides exactly what you are looking for. Segment by vehicle type, by site, by use. The gap between the best and the worst decile is where your savings are — not the average.
Go furtherTotal cost of ownership of a fleet·Calculating fuel consumption·The TCO calculator
Chapter 3Keeping servicing and due dates
Three calendars coexist and follow different logics: the roadworthiness test, set by regulation according to the category and age of the vehicle; the manufacturer service plan, driven by mileage and time, which is paid for at return if not respected; the consumables, which depend on real use rather than the calendar.
Anticipating, in practice
A useful alert fires before the due date, not on the day. Common practice is a first signal at ninety days — time to book without taking the vehicle off a round — then a reminder at thirty.
A spreadsheet does not ring. That is what gets paid in fines, downtime and end-of-lease penalties.
Go furtherVehicle servicing·The service·The emissions test·Tyre speed and load ratings
Our Excel templates follow exactly this structure — inventory, costs, due dates — with the formulas already written.
Chapter 4Organising the relationship with drivers
The document that avoids the arguments
A vehicle allocation policy writes down once and for all who is entitled to what, under which conditions, with which duties. Without it, every allocation is renegotiated and every exception becomes a precedent.
Tracking: what the law frames
Tracking a vehicle used by an employee is processing of personal data. The French authority frames the purpose, the retention period, the information given to employees and the consultation of staff representatives. The rule most often forgotten: the employee must be able to switch tracking off outside working time when the vehicle may be used privately.
A fleet that deploys telematics without telling its drivers is not taking a technical risk: it is taking a social and a legal one. The telematics and GDPR guide sets out how to proceed.
Go furtherDriver safety·Eco-driving at work·Work travel and labour law
Chapter 5Mastering taxation and regulation
Four subjects come back every year: the benefit in kind, whose calculation depends on the ownership model and on who pays for fuel; the annual taxes on passenger vehicles, based on emissions and age; the annual incentive tax, which looks not at the fleet as a stock but at the vehicles added over a rolling period; the driving restrictions, whose impact is operational before it is fiscal.
Never copy a rate from an article, this one included. Take it from the source — the tax authority, the social security authority, the official gazette — and date the check in your documentation. An out-of-date rate in a spreadsheet propagates through a whole payroll.
Go furtherThe vehicle benefit in kind·The ecological penalty·Low-emission zones·The benefit-in-kind calculator·The greening tax simulator
Chapter 6Steering the renewal
Renewing "every four years" is a habit, not a method. The right moment is when the ownership cost per kilometre of the ageing vehicle exceeds that of an equivalent new one.
The three signals to watch
- Going over the contractual mileage. Spotted early, it is renegotiated; spotted at return, it is paid for.
- Servicing costs drifting. Two unplanned immobilisations in a year on the same vehicle is a reliable signal.
- The regulation coming. A vehicle that will no longer be allowed into an area where you work is a vehicle to take out, whatever its condition.
Go furtherRenting light commercial vehicles·The long-term leasing guide·The ROI simulator
Chapter 7Getting tooled up at the right time
A well-built workbook goes a long way, and it beats badly configured software. Three signals say it has reached its limit, and none of them is about the size of the fleet.
- A due date was missed. The file warns of nothing: you have to remember to open it.
- Two versions of the file are going around. From two people onwards there are two truths and an attachment called "v3-final-corrected".
- A question from management goes unanswered. "What does the Lyon site cost us?" takes an hour of reprocessing: the answer arrives after the decision.
The first of those signals often arrives well before the twentieth vehicle.
How to choose without getting it wrong
Write your criteria before seeing the first demo, weight them, and score every solution on the same grid. Without that, it is the last demo seen that wins. And run the trial on your own data: a demo on a fictitious fleet says nothing about what your Monday morning will look like.
Go furtherManaging a fleet in Excel: method and limits·The evaluation grid·Pricing
A demo starts from your vehicles, not from a fictitious fleet.