The Beginner’s Guide to Fleet Management

Fleets are one of those company assets that grow exponentially more difficult to manage as they scale: I’m talking about maintenance, acquisition and replacement, depreciation, parts and fuel, and insurance. And we haven’t even covered drivers, routes, and usage trends yet. 

Mastering fleet management quickly is crucial to controlling these costs and maximizing the fleet’s benefit to your organization and customers. 

If you’re looking to invest in a fleet, or if you’ve just been assigned to a fleet management role for the first time, this is a good place to start. In this guide, we’ll cover the basics of managing a fleet and the tools that will make your job easier. 

By the time we’re finished, you’ll have a solid grasp of:

• What fleet management is

• Industries that rely on vehicle fleet management

• Equipment necessary to manage a vehicle fleet

• What to look for in fleet management software

Let’s begin by exploring what fleet management actually is.

What is fleet management?

Fleet management is how your company ensures you’re getting the most value out of your vehicles and drivers. Involves using hardware devices (e.g. vehicle GPS trackers) to monitor your trucks, vans, cars, and heavy machinery, and software to process all of that tracking information into a useful format such as reports, performance analysis, and maintenance forecasts. This helps you identify potential logistics problems, find better ways to spend resources, and address safety concerns. 

Fleet management primarily relies on GPS technology, dash cameras, vehicle telematics, and fleet management software to track vehicles and record data. Depending on the device, you’ll be able to monitor driver routes, travelling speed, the number and duration of stops, fuel usage, hard braking, odometer readings, and more. 

Fleet management isn’t new, by the way. Any company that’s ever had more than one vehicle has been practicing fleet management in one form or another–whether that’s in 2025 or 1975. But systems used to be a lot more reliant on paper-based processes. And truth be told, many modern businesses still operate that way.

The downside of this analog approach is that it’s harder to notice if your drivers have overlapping or inefficient routes. Maybe a particular vehicle is being overused, or a specific driver is pushing their vehicle rather hard. These things don’t show up on paper and are only detected when the vehicle breaks or is taken in for maintenance. 

But technology-based fleet management programs can help you monitor vehicles more closely and prevent costly, unscheduled downtime. You may also discover that a driver has been taking unapproved detours, making unscheduled or excessively long stops, or consistently speeding. 

Some of the drivers may grumble about vehicle GPS trackers and dash cameras holding them accountable, but it’s necessary to protect them and the company against potential fraud and helps ensure their workload is more manageable. 

For example, you might be able to detect that one of your drivers has too many stops, which can cause driver fatigue, increase frustration, and risk burnout. Detecting and addressing these issues right away will go a long way towards protecting the driver’s health and increasing compliance with labor department regulations. 

Fleet management tools can also help you support your drivers if they encounter a delay on their route. If a stop takes longer than expected, that driver may not be able to notify you immediately (like if they’re elbow-deep into a customer’s plumbing). This delay would affect the rest of the day’s appointments. 

With fleet management software and GPS trackers for your vehicles, you can catch delays before they impact customers. You can either reroute another driver or notify the next customer in advance.

What industries use fleet management?

Fleet management is most valuable for organizations with multiple vehicles and/or companies that operate within a large geographic area. The more vehicles you need to manage, the more your vehicles are used, and the more ground you cover, the more value a fleet management system can bring in terms of costs and efficiency.

That said, even small operations can still benefit greatly from fleet management. At Spytec GPS, we get a lot of SMBs that need to squeeze every ounce of efficiency out of their fleet. Businesses like:

Moving companies

If you’re a moving company, your entire business hinges on the availability and efficiency of your moving trucks. Truck GPS trackers ensure you always know where your vehicles are, how far they’ve gone, and the number of stops they make. With the right vehicle tracking tech, you can monitor additional information like fuel efficiency and engine runtime, too.

Fleet management software may reveal that your drivers are taking too much time during stops or being too hard on your trucks. You might also see in advance that a truck will need a trip to the shop and get a more thorough inspection based on how hard it was run. And if you rent vehicles to customers, many new dash cams can detect accidents (and notify you via email or app) and ensure you always have a truthful record of what happened–no matter what the customer might claim. 

Construction

Construction companies often have expensive equipment scattered across numerous construction sites throughout the city or state, so it’s incredibly important to have a reliable way of keeping track of it all. Excavators, bulldozers, dump trucks, cement mixers, and other specialized vehicles are also expensive to operate and even more costly to break or lose, so you want to make sure your crews are being as efficient with them as possible. 

GPS trackers for construction vehicles can create geofences around job sites. This helps ensure your equipment doesn’t go anywhere it’s not supposed to. You can also monitor fuel efficiency, speed, and other metrics.

Landscaping

Lawn care and landscaping are industries where optimization is vital. When you take on clients, you’re essentially selling your crew’s time. Every day there is a tight schedule your landscaping teams will have to stick to.

Fleet management software will help you see exactly how long each job takes so you can optimize accordingly. You’ll also be able to identify areas where your teams are taking too long, so that you can create efficient routes and eliminate overlap between crews. 

Cleaning services

Similarly, you may want a GPS tracker for cleaning services so that employees can be held accountable for their time as they travel to and from job sites. Additionally, fleet management software helps you adjust your schedule when a job takes longer than expected. When your customers are planning their day around your estimated timeline, it’s important that you have a way to recognize if a job is taking longer than you originally planned, so that you can update cleaning clients as soon as possible.

Car leasing and renting

When a customer stops paying for the vehicle they leased or rented, you need a reliable way of getting it back. A hidden GPS tracker is a basic necessity for car leasing companies because it helps them more easily recover vehicles that would’ve been extremely difficult to find. 

Fleet management software would be the backend that keeps track of all your vehicles and shows their location. When you need to repossess the vehicle, the GPS tracker lets you see exactly where to get it, and also lets you share that information with either the towing company or the police.

Hundreds of car leasing and car rental companies have used the combination of fleet management software and hidden GPS trackers to reduce costs and keep personnel and property safe. 

GPS trackers can also help you automatically record mileage and fuel usage for tax-related purposes (any business that uses company vehicles can benefit from that). 

What do you need to manage your vehicle fleet?

Fleet management primarily relies on three main components: GPS trackers for vehicles, dash cams, and fleet management software. The specific models and brands you need depend on what your most concerned about monitoring. If your top priority is security, you’re going to need different equipment than an organization that wants to focus on optimization.

Fleet GPS trackers 

GPS trackers come in a wide variety, and each specific tracker device is often designed for a specific purpose, which you should keep in mind as you shop for vehicle GPS trackers. Some are battery-powered, while others plug directly into the on-board diagnostics (OBD) port, and yet others are installed into the car battery. 

GPS trackers that plug into the OBD port can give you a lot of valuable data to help you optimize your vehicles, such as fuel usage, ignition status, engine health, braking force, acceleration, and more. But they’re not very discreet. 

Depending on where your vehicle’s OBD port is, your GPS tracker may be immediately visible to anyone sitting in the front seat. That shouldn’t be a problem with employees–there are laws that govern GPS tracking your employees and their own responsibilities–but it makes it easy for a would-be thief or unscrupulous customer to disable.

If security is your concern, it might be better to invest in a small, hidden GPS tracker that won’t be seen right away by someone in the driver’s seat. You need a discreet tracker that you can easily conceal on the exterior of your vehicle, like the Spytec Mini GPS with its magnetic waterproof case. The Spytec Swift Wired GPS tracker also goes beneath the hood, which is another out of the way spot. 

These models won’t have the advanced analytics you get with an OBD GPS tracker, but they can notify you when your vehicle leaves a designated area. This is ideal if your vehicles are supposed to stay at, say, a construction site or another location that’s difficult to secure. 

GPS trackers can also use geo fencing to create a virtual perimeter around the location you want your vehicle tos tay. If your vehicle leaves the perimeter, then the tracker will notify you. Not all vehicle GPS trackers support geo fencing, so if security is important to you, make sure you buy a tracker device with this capability. 

You should also pay attention to how the tracker notifies you. For fleet management purposes, an email notification might be more valuable (and tolerable) than a text message or push notification, especially if you’ve got hundreds of vehicles generating alerts. 

Dash cameras

Dash cams help determine who’s liable in an accident. If your business relies on vehicles and has drivers on public roads, dash cams are a must. They protect your drivers from fraudulent claims, ensure clear resolutions to insurance disputes, and help you monitor abuse of company property. Some dash cameras also connect to your car GPS device to record your vehicle’s speed and coordinates along with the footage. 

Fleet management software

Fleet management software is your best way to interact with your GPS tracking devices. It’s how you actually access the data they transmit. While your trackers and cameras provide the information, your fleet management platform organizes it in useful ways. In many cases, you may have separate dashboards and apps for your various devices.

What to look for in fleet management software 

While tracking vehicles is pretty straightforward, some fleet management software programs are a lot more complex or comprehensive than others. Some are only designed to help with specific aspects of fleet management. Others have all the functionality you need, but are afflicted with a terrible UI that makes it frustrating and confusing.

When you start looking at fleet management software, here’s what you’ll want to compare:

Cost

Your fleet management software is constantly accessing data transmitted from numerous devices, and it’ll likely need to store that data for an extended period. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that fleet management software is generally subscription-based. There’s almost always going to be a monthly fee to access your data and reporting, so it’s important to select a platform that works within your budget.

Data

The specific vehicle GPS trackers you choose will change what kinds of data or telematics you have access to. As we mentioned before, OBD trackers can give you more information because they’re directly connected to the vehicle’s diagnostics. But you need to make sure your fleet management software can display and organize that data as well.

Depending on your goals, you may want your software to monitor:

• Stop location

• Stop duration

• Last stop

• Mileage

• Ignition status

• Speed

• Direction

• Fuel usage

• Engine health

• Braking force

• Dash cam footage

Keep in mind that not every fleet management platform can access this data or organize it in a useful way.

Reporting

Reporting is one of the most significant differences between fleet management software programs. In most cases, your problem won’t be finding a platform that provides the data you need. Your problem will be finding one that organizes that data in ways you can actually use. 

If your GPS tracking software is recording every stop along with braking force, mileage, fuel usage, etc. for every vehicle, that quickly becomes an overwhelming amount of data. You need a platform that lets you filter this data based on what you want to see.

Maybe you want to focus on fuel efficiency, so you want to filter all your vehicles by fuel usage or mileage. Or maybe there are specific drivers or vehicles you want to home in on. Or you want to reduce stop time, so you need to filter by stop duration.

Your software’s reporting capabilities directly impacts your ability to manage and optimize your fleet. So be sure to explore the user interface you’ll rely on every day before you invest in a platform.

Consider Spytec GPS as your fleet management solution

The right fleet management solution will help you track and secure your vehicles as well as find clear, actionable ways to lower costs and increase efficiency.

We designed SpyTec GPS to give businesses of all shapes and sizes the tools they need to manage their vehicles. We’ve streamlined reporting to let you organize your data in the ways that are most useful to you. And the software itself is simple and intuitive, so it’s easy to find what you need.

Reach out to our team of GPS and small business experts today!