Every business running vehicles knows what its fleet costs. The figures are on the invoices — fuel cards, insurance, servicing, tyres, road tax, finance. Add them up and you have a number you can put in a spreadsheet.
The trouble is that this number is only the part somebody sends you a bill for. The rest of it — the twenty minutes a van sits idling with the heater on, the engineer sent from the wrong side of town, the job that had to be done twice because the first visit was disputed — never appears as a line on anything. It comes out of your margin quietly, month after month, and because nothing ever arrives in the post you have no particular reason to look for it.
This article is about that second number. It will help you work out roughly how large it is in your business, using your figures rather than ours, and show you exactly where it comes from — so you can decide what is worth doing about it.
The costs that never appear on an invoice
There is a reason these costs stay hidden, and it is not carelessness. It is that each one is individually trivial. Twenty minutes of idling is a few pence of diesel. One engineer taking the long way round is a couple of quid. One disputed visit is an awkward phone call.
None of it is worth a conversation on its own. The problem is arithmetic: the same trivial amount, multiplied by the number of vehicles you run, multiplied by the number of working days in a year. Five vans wasting twenty minutes a day is not five wasted twenty-minute periods. It is around four hundred hours of running engine a year, and it is the same four hundred hours next year too.
That is the whole of the argument. Not that any individual thing is expensive, but that small numbers repeated several thousand times stop being small.
Work out what your fleet is costing you
Rather than quote industry averages at you, the calculator below works entirely on figures you enter, and it shows its working so you can check every step.
One figure it needs from you is how much fuel a vehicle burns while stationary with the engine running. That varies with engine size, load and whether the heating or a power tool is running, so you can set it to whatever fits your fleet.
Your fleet, your figures
What this shows you. Your own arithmetic, on your own figures, putting a yearly number on the items that never reach an invoice. It tells you which of them is worth looking at first — and once you can see where the time and the fuel actually go, you are in a position to do something about it.
Whatever number came out, the useful question is not whether it is big. It is whether you would have guessed it. Most fleet owners we speak to are not far out on fuel and badly out on the other two, because fuel arrives as a bill and the others do not arrive as anything at all.
The rest of this article is the six places that number usually comes from.
1. The forty-five minute lunch that lasts eighty
A van is parked outside Bap & Grill at 12:47. That is entirely normal and nobody would think twice about it. The question is not whether it is there at 12:47 — it is whether it is still there at 14:07.
Most drivers do exactly the hours they are paid for, and a journey history is how you know that rather than assume it. It shows you the difference between a team running well and one that has quietly drifted — and when it is the first, you have the evidence to leave them to it.
Across five vehicles, an extra half hour a day is roughly six hundred hours a year of paid time. You would notice six hundred hours if it arrived as an invoice.
2. Fuel is the symptom, not the problem
Fuel is the one cost every fleet owner already watches, because it is the one that arrives as a number every month. When it goes up, the usual response is to look at fuel prices, or at the driver with the highest spend.
Neither tells you much. A high fuel bill is an outcome, and it has several possible causes that all look identical on a fuel card statement: idling, poor routing, extra miles that were never part of a job, heavy traffic at the wrong time of day, or simply sending the wrong vehicle because you did not know where the others were.
Those have completely different fixes. Routing is a planning problem. Idling is a habit. Unexplained mileage is a conversation. A tracker tells you which of them you are actually dealing with, and that is what turns fuel spend from a number you watch into one you can act on.
3. The customer standing on the driveway
Somebody has taken a morning off work. It is 11:35 and they are on the driveway looking up the road, and they have rung twice. You do not know exactly where your engineer is, so you tell them what you always tell them, which is that he is on his way.
The direct cost of this is small and the indirect cost is not. It is the review that does not get written, the repeat business that quietly goes elsewhere, and — more often than people expect — the second visit, because the customer gave up and went out.
There is a version of this that is pure waste: an engineer twenty minutes away is sent to a job while another one, who finished a street away fifteen minutes ago, drives past it in the other direction. That is not anybody's fault. Without knowing where the vehicles are, the dispatch decision is a guess.
4. The van that moves on a Saturday
A work van pulls out at 09:16 on a Saturday morning. That might be completely legitimate — a callout, an agreed personal-use arrangement, somebody collecting materials for Monday. Or it might be a hundred and fifty personal miles a weekend that the business is paying for in fuel, tyres, servicing and depreciation.
A movement alert on a Saturday morning tells you which it is, in a second, without anybody having to ask. And a policy everybody knows is visible is one that largely enforces itself.
5. "Nobody turned up"
A customer says your engineer never arrived. Your engineer says he did, waited fifteen minutes and left. Both of them believe what they are saying.
Without a record this is unresolvable, and because it is unresolvable it usually gets settled the same way — you send somebody back, free, because arguing with a customer costs more than the visit. That is a full job's cost written off, and it is written off in a way that never gets categorised as anything.
A journey history answers it in about ten seconds: arrival time, departure time, how long the vehicle was there. Most of the value is not in winning the argument. It is in the arguments that stop happening once everybody knows there is a record.
6. The empty yard at 2am
The last one is the one everybody thinks of first, and it is genuinely the least common — but it is also the only one on this list that can take a vehicle off the road for weeks and put several thousand pounds of tools with it.
The odds are not encouraging once a vehicle is gone. Across all stolen vehicles — tracked or not — the Crime Survey for England and Wales puts the proportion returned to their owner at about a quarter in the year to March 2025, and at no point in the last decade has it risen above 44% (ONS, Nature of crime: vehicle-related theft, Table 4). Most stolen vehicles are simply never seen again.
This is where a tracker works fastest. The moment the vehicle moves when it should not, you know — and you have a live location to give straight to the police while the trail is still warm. A vehicle whose position you can see is far more likely to come back than one nobody can find, and speed is what makes the difference: knowing at 02:13 rather than at seven the next morning is often what gets a van home before it is stripped or moved on.
What tracking gives you
Every situation above comes down to the same thing: knowing what actually happened. That is what a tracker gives you.
It records where each vehicle went, when it stopped, for how long, how far it travelled and how long the engine ran. Six situations that were matters of opinion become facts you can look up in seconds.
What you do with that is where the money is. The businesses that get the most out of it are the ones that use it — dispatching the nearest van rather than the one that springs to mind, having the idling conversation once with the figures on the table, setting a weekend policy everybody knows is visible. The information is the lever, and pulling it is what moves the number.
Being straight with your drivers
This part gets skipped in most fleet tracking advertising and it should not be, because it is both a legal obligation and — in our experience — the thing that determines whether tracking works in a business or causes six months of bad feeling.
If you track vehicles driven by employees, you are processing information about those employees, and UK data protection law requires you to tell them: what is recorded, why, and what it will be used for. It is not optional and it is not something to bury in a handbook nobody reads.
We give every driver a card at installation setting out what has been fitted and what it records. Fleets that explain the reasoning up front tend to settle within a fortnight, and it starts the whole thing on the right footing.
Framed properly, most drivers are not hostile to it. A journey history that proves an engineer attended protects the engineer at least as often as it protects the business.
So is it worth it?
That depends on the number your own figures produced. The cost side of the comparison is straightforward, because our pricing is published in full.
Base Tracking is £8.99 per vehicle per month on a 24-month term, and Pro Tracking is £10.99. Those figures include VAT, the tracker itself, installation by our own expert technicians, the SIM and the data. There are no separate hardware, installation, setup or activation charges. Every term length is set out in full on the pricing page.
A minimum term is not the only way in. Pay-as-you-go tracking carries no contract at all — you buy a block of time, nothing renews automatically, no payment is ever taken without you asking, and you top up whenever it suits you. Prices are on the top-up page. If a fixed term does not fit the way your business works, say so when you get in touch and we will go through the options with you.
Our suggestion is a simple one: take the number your own figures produced above, work out which of the six situations is costing you the most, and start there. That is where tracking will pay for itself soonest.
Where would you start?
Tell us how many vehicles you run and what you are trying to find out. We will tell you honestly whether tracking is likely to help, and what it would cost. We cover Milton Keynes and the Home Counties, and we come to you.
Talk to us about your fleet