Your company has worked hard to get the right fleet fuel program in place. You've picked the right card provider for your company and you might have even negotiated discounts with your fuel providers. Congratulations, your fuel management job has just begun. What a lot of companies foolishly do is put a fleet fuel program in place and forget about it, assuming it will manage itself.

Yes, some companies will look at their transactions or exception reports. But do they look at all of them? Do they check them for duplicate transactions? How about ascertaining whether their negotiated discounts are coming through? Too many companies would answer no to many of these questions. Reason being, they don't have the time or tools in place to check. So, how would you audit your fleet fuel invoices?

For starters, you're going to need to have someone with some time on their hands; then you're going to buy them the information they need to do the job. The information they'll need is OPIS, DTN or some other pricing source that reports daily and at a local level. Don't use a wide index like NYMEX, DOE or AAA national pricing, as there are too many different price differentials from one area to another.

These services are not cheap but they are a must if you're going to manage a successful program. For each one of your fuel transactions, you'll need your price per gallon. Then strip away all federal, state, county and local taxes. You might need a tax guide to help with this. This will provide you with your fuel cost only. Included in your fuel cost will be the fuel cost as well as the margin the vendor charged you. Now take the OPIS (or DTN) pricing for the same date as your transaction for the area it was purchased and compare your fuel cost with the OPIS cost. You'll notice a differential in the numbers. That differential is the margin you paid the vendor. Every business is entitled to a margin. Let's face it, if they didn't charge one they'd go out of business. But how big a fuel margin do they deserve? Does the margin you're paying match (or come close to) the fuel price deals you'd be able to negotiate on your own? If not, why?

Another thing to watch out for is whether you're getting a duplicate transaction feed from your fleet fuel card provider? It happens more than you might think. You might ask yourself why it happens so often, but if you compare it to the number of fuel transactions they're processing on a daily basis, it's fairly low. But when you produce hundreds of thousands of transactions a day, things happen. Catching them is your responsibility. If you're not watching closely enough to catch a mistake, chances are your fleet fuel card provider won't catch it either.

There is an old expression that "they don't respect what you don't inspect". If you're not performing daily fuel management audits on your fleet fuel purchases, you're giving money away. We've seen it too many times. It's not always the case that someone is trying to make a few extra cents off of you (sometimes it is); it usually comes down to an improperly set-up account or some kind of change was made to the account that wasn't entered in properly. Since you don't audit your numbers, they look like what they are - numbers. But when you peel back the skin and take a deeper look and compare the numbers to a benchmark, the numbers are still just numbers - but they're numbers with a propose.

This is something that can be performed by all companies, if you have the necessary time, experience and historical price data at your disposal.