Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/196134
62 • NOVEMBER 2013 • WORLD FENCE NEWS Upgraded fuel management technology simplifies the budgeting process BY JACK LEE , PRESIDENT / CEO , 4REFUEL INC . Your Complete Source for VIKING ACCESS SYSTEMS™, the Most Innovative Access Control Products on the Market! Proudly Providing These Quality Brands American Access Systems, Inc. • Apollo™ Gate Operators Click2Enter® • Diablo Controls, Inc. • DoorKing® • Elite™ HySecurity® • Linear® • SecuraKey Gatekeepers, Inc. is a full service distributor centrally located near Chattanooga, Tenn., with 1 to 2 days shipping to most of the Eastern United States. Orders ship within 24 hours. 800-378-Gate (4283) • 423-332-5808 • www.gatekeepers.net Top ten ways you know you're at a cheap amusement park – From David Letterman's Top Ten List 10. The roller coaster has seven loops, zero safety harnesses 9. Sign reads, "You must be this tall to exit" 8. Mascots walk around asking for spare change 7. Before getting on ride, operator asks if you have any last wishes 6. Fine print on each ticket says they can harvest your organs 5. So-called "ride" is just some guy shoving you for two minutes 4. Log flume is "bring your own log" 3. Most popular ride: The shuttle to the parking lot 2. The park only has five flags 1. There were seven kids in the Tilt-A-Whirl when it started....... I used to cringe every spring when our chief accountant sent around the note advising me that it was "that time of year again." I'm not talking about tax time, but time to plan the annual operations budget. Before resource management software came along we had to wade through a paper jungle just to get a ballpark estimate. Reports, notes, revise and re-revise, then repeat with the revised revisions that came in from all the other regions. And after finally receiving them, they had to be sorted, grouped and entered onto a single spreadsheet for all to read. Remember those days? Are you still living them? Fortunately this process has been digitally streamlined to make our lives a lot easier, all except for one major capital cost – fuel – the second highest operating cost for businesses in transport and construction. Fuel costs continue to require yesterday's hunting and gathering approach because there's simply been no software or application to make fuel budgeting and forecasting as easy. None until now, that is. "A fully integrated, online system that centralizes all my fuel expenses isn't just a boost to users, it's a giant leap to a whole new level of cost-control, budget analysis and reporting," said Dan Jennings, a chief financial officer and a chartered accountant with over 20 years of experience around the world with truck fleets and business management. He was involved in the development of an online fuel accounting system called Fuel Management Online (FMO). As the CFO of 4Refuel, a leading company in the fuel management business, the FMO developers sought Jennings' input when designing the new capabilities of FMO to get a true financial user's perspective. "What we'd identified was a total lack of technology to help companies manage, track, budget and forecast fuel consumption," he noted. Jennings compares fuel expenses to the cost of labor, noting, "For most companies that use fuel to do business, it's the second largest expense next to labor. When managing your labor costs there's plenty of payroll software available to help measure, forecast and manage the effects that labor costs have on the bottom line. Outside of FMO, there is simply nothing like this for fuel." Entirely web-based, FMO has been attracting a growing following in the past few years because it provides users with detailed fuel consumption reports and operating data. It's able to collect and store a variety of useful information through a data transponder about the size of a dollar coin that is attached to each piece of equipment. It provides details like hourly and daily fuel usage, operating hours, idling time, hard revving, etc., and delivers it as reports to your secure online account or directly to your desktop via e-mail. The reports can also be exported from FMO in a number of formats so that the data can be easily imported to any accounting software. Enhanced FMO now eliminates the "hunting and gathering" part of budgeting fuel. In the past, CFOs have relied on admin staff, purchasers or fleet managers from outside of their office to report the information that makes it possible to calculate and project their fuel expenditure. With FMO, instead of hunting and gathering all of the different reports on trucks, equipment and other vehicle's consumption from staff for each individual region, it's automatically gathered and displayed as reports in a single place. These reports are the valuable tools number-crunchers use to calculate a real return on investment for each liter of fuel consumed and ultimately the profitability of each unit. continued on page 68