The benefits of fleet insurance might offer your company some significant advantages.

Here we will quickly examine just what that might mean for the typical fleet manager and their associated business.

Fleet management is time intensive

The moment you have a number of vehicles under management in a single company, you may typically also have a substantial administrative overhead.

One only has to consider things such as maintenance schedules, MOTs, valeting, periodic insurance renewals and so on, to see the size of the challenge once a fleet becomes larger than say two or three vehicles.

By the time you start getting to larger fleets, perhaps comprising numbers of company cars, delivery vans and heavy goods vehicles, the sheer administrative overhead can become a major headache. In the specific context of insurance, having an individual policy for each vehicle in your fleet can make that administrative task even worse.

This means that the first immediately apparent benefits of fleet insurance is that it potentially offers one policy for all of the vehicles in your fleet. That may well prove to be a huge reduction in your administrative overhead by virtue of having one annual renewal date.

It also means you only have one relationship to manage with one insurer, as opposed to several.

Cost-effectiveness

In many domains of business, it is a reality of life that the more custom you give to a provider or supplier, the more you will be able to apply commercial leverage to your advantage in terms of pricing.

Broadly speaking, this logic holds good in the area of insurance too. Having a single policy with a single provider of fleet insurance may well mean that you are likely to obtain a more cost-effective solution than if you have an individual policy per vehicle.

Issues

Occasionally, it is possible to hear people expressing concerns about the viability of fleet insurance in their particular business situation.

It’s perhaps, therefore, worth stressing that typically:

• it is possible to secure policies offering cover for all types of vehicles in the fleet. That might include things such as cars, vans and other types of vehicle;
• some policies may also be able to offer cover for both business and personal use. That might be particularly important for those companies who allow employees to take cars or vans home in the evenings and at weekends for their own personal use;
• it may be possible to find policies offering unlimited mileage cover – something that will be close to the hearts of many fleet managers who are operating long-distance fleets that include vans and HGVs;
• most commercial use of vehicles can be covered on one policy. There may occasionally be some exceptions, such as in situations where you are transporting highly hazardous goods, in which case additional cover or even possibly a separate policy may be required for the vehicles concerned.

Summary

For all the above reasons plus several others, considering the benefits of fleet insurance should be something that is standard practice for any fleet manager or business owner.

It might be important to contact someone who has specialist knowledge of such policies – such as ourselves at GSI Insurance – in order to ensure that you find suitable and cost-effective cover.