Not only do business owners need to trust and keep an eye on their current employees, but sometimes there’s reason to worry about ex-employees as well. Our most recent Customer Connect contest winner, Chem-Wise Ecological Pest Management, discovered just that when their fuel bills weren’t lining up with their fleet monitoring reports…
“During our routine audit of fuel purchases, we noticed a couple of charges that made no sense. The process we have developed is to run a side-by-side comparison of our FleetMatics Stop Report with the time stamped fuel statement. We keep a fuel card at a gas station nearest our office, and the technicians fuel up as they come and go from the office. During the audit we noticed that several vehicle numbers were used on different days, within a general time frame, but those vehicles were never in the area. We spoke to the gas station manager and asked them to always confirm a company vehicle was at a pump before running the card. The following statement reflected a drastic increase of the occurrences, exceeding $1000.00!
After compiling the list of dates and times, we then approached the gas station manager again, expecting to find out that a current employee of ours was bringing in personal vehicles for fuel and car washes, or a gas station employee selling our gas to their friends. The manager was very cooperative and used the time stamps from our fuel statement to pull a couple of the security videos. To our dismay, we found out that a recently terminated employee, who knew the procedures and vehicle numbers, was coming in 2-3 times per week and filling up his vehicles and getting car washes.
If it wasn’t for FleetMatics’ easy to run and extremely accurate Stop Time Reports, we never would have been able to run this audit and catch the thief, and who knows how many others would have gotten away with this for a very long time! We have since changed our procedures to avoid this situation in the future, and have developed a new system to track fuel purchases through our gps tracking software.”
