Spreadsheet or software: what a 20-car fleet spends on admin each week

Six jobs, one spreadsheet

A 20-car fleet running on a spreadsheet and a phone has six recurring jobs every week: send the rent invoice, match each payment to the right driver, work the toll statement, check for new tickets, check what is close to expiring, and answer drivers. None of it is hard on its own. Added together over a week, it is most of a working day, usually the same one person's day, squeezed between everything else a small fleet owner does.

What follows is a worksheet, not a survey. Every figure in it is an assumption: a minutes-per-task number and a count for the week. Change either one to match your own fleet and the total changes with it. The arithmetic is the point, not the total it happens to produce here.

The worksheet

Two hundred ninety-five minutes is under five hours, out of a week that presumably has other things in it too. Raise any one assumption and the total moves with it: if matching a payment takes six minutes instead of three, that line alone adds another hour. Add a seventh car, or a slower month for tickets, and the whole sheet shifts again; nothing here is fixed.

Where the estimate breaks first

Three of the six jobs above are the ones that run past their own assumption, and the reason is the same each time: the fact you need is not written down anywhere you can see it. A payment lands under a name that does not match the driver's, and you spend time guessing instead of checking. A toll or a ticket posts for a car that changed hands that same week, and the minute it should take turns into a text asking who had the car on Tuesday. A registration or a license comes up for renewal and nobody wrote the date on the sheet to begin with, so the first sign of it is a letter in the mail or a car turned away at inspection.

None of that shows up as its own row above. It shows up as the gap between the worksheet's total and what the week actually felt like. It also does not show up as a cost at all when the person doing it is out sick or busy with something else; it shows up as a driver whose reminder never went out, or a toll that got billed to the wrong person because nobody was sure who had the car that day.

Change the numbers, not the method

If five hours a week sounds low for your fleet, it probably is, and the fix is not a different headline number. It is your own minutes and your own counts in the table above. Time how long one invoice actually takes to prepare and send, or count how many payments you had to chase down last week rather than match on sight, and use those figures instead of ours.

Do the same for a slow month of tickets versus a fast one, since the count per week is the assumption most likely to be wrong in either direction. The worksheet holds up either way. Only the total moves.