Q&A: How top HVAC businesses slash fleet costs with Coast

This story was written in partnership with Coast. Watch the full recording 

Homepros recently moderated a discussion on how leading HVAC businesses are effectively managing their fleet expenses. 

The conversation — between Andy Barnes, fleet manager at California-based Air Control Systems, which operates 150 trucks, and Dylan Berno, head of customer success at Coast — covered practical strategies for reducing fuel costs, including smart card limits, fraud prevention controls, and more. 

Below are the highlights, lightly edited for clarity. 

Andy, to start, can you give us some color on your ‘fleet tech’ setup?

Yeah, we use Coast for both our fuel and some non-fuel transactions. We use Fleetio to track all of our expenses, and all of the data from Coast dumps into it, so our finance team can use the reports. 

And then we use Samsara for the telematics and safety side, and that data also dumps into Fleetio — it’s nice using those three programs together because they talk really well to each other. 

Do you have a good example that illustrates how you’re using everything, day-to-day?

As a fleet manager, I’m constantly evaluating our fleet to see if we’re utilizing our vehicles properly, because we all know that fuel is such a huge expense. 

Just recently, I was running a report looking at different vehicles and noticed that we had two supervisors and three quarter-ton pickup trucks that were getting twelve miles to the gallon. And they’re driving almost four thousand miles a month. 

But we have another supervisor in a Silverado with a four-cylinder engine that’s getting ten to twelve miles per gallon better. So, using the reporting has allowed us to identify two vehicles that we can easily replace, which will save us about seven thousand dollars a year, per vehicle. 

Dylan, before we started, we chatted about gas station selection and how contractors are approaching it. Can you elaborate on that?

We’ve all seen this: You dig into a month’s worth of fuel spend and find somebody who’s been filling up at stations that are charging way too much. Within Coast’s map, we’ll highlight the most expensive fill-ups within a given time period. 

For instance, somebody recently paid $5.94 a gallon, but if they’d driven pretty close by, they would have paid $4.50. So when you scale that to 10 to 30+ vehicles, there are incredible savings to be had. And then we can couple that with identifying partner stations through our network where there are greater rebates, and that’s when it starts to compound. 

Andy, how do you guys approach incentivizing drivers from a safety standpoint?

It’s a constant work in progress for us, but something simple is that we have a weekly scorecard that gets pumped out through our telematics system, and we have company-wide meetings every quarter to celebrate the highest-scoring drivers. 

I understand that you have strong, positive opinions about Coast when it comes to fraud prevention. Is that right?

Our previous fuel provider provided us with magnetic strip cards only, and we were having our cards ‘skimmed’ at the station like three or four times a year. I’d see the transactions and fraud alerts, cancel the cards, and I’d have to prove that our vehicles weren’t there. It was a total pain in the butt. Coast’s cards are tap-to-pay, which are much more secure.

You mentioned earlier that you use the cards for both fuel and some non-fuel transactions. What does that look like?

We have our cards pretty much locked for fuel only, but as we’ve expanded, we’ve unlocked some cards in our greater service area for people to get things like tire repairs, because it doesn’t make sense for them to drive two and a half hours to get one, for instance. 

Through Coast, drivers can request pre-authorization from me, via text, and I can approve a transaction, like in the case where they need to purchase a new tire if it’s not repairable.

Dylan, what other use cases are you finding among contractors, Coast-wide?

We have different types of cards that are built for different use cases. With some, you can only buy fuel, and others can be for fuel and maintenance — oil changes, washer fluid — but not snacks or personal items. And then there are unrestricted cards, which are typically used by managers, admins, etcetera. 

Andy: That’s just the tip of the iceberg. We have probably 10 different spend controls, because what my mechanic buys is different than what our field employees buy. We actually have a travel category, so when we have to send guys up north for two days, they can take folks out to dinner. We preset the amounts, including for their hotel, and when they come back, with two clicks of a button, we reset their cards to normal permissions. So the flexibility has been great. 

For either of you: Any closing thoughts?

Dylan: A final thing I want to touch on is GPS-powered controls. With Coast, if your vehicle’s not at the pump, the transaction gets blocked. We’ve also been going deeper on eliminating fraud by comparing gallons purchased to actual tank changes from telematics systems. We’ll pull in tank-level data from your system and line it up against what was swiped at the pump. 

If someone runs 30 gallons, and the truck only accepts 10, you don’t need to run an audit. We’re gonna give you the answer and flag that transaction, so you can get down to it. 

Andy: Yeah, we have 150 vehicles, and we drive 2.5 million miles a year. It would be impossible for me to look at every single transaction to say, “Does this match up?” So the fact that Coast looks at and sends us that data is great. 

This story was written in partnership with Coast. Watch the full recording