The best mobile apps for fleets
Dated:
23 December 2021
| Author: Jack Carfrae
Jack Carfrae brings together ten of the best apps for fleet managers and company car drivers.
You would be hard pressed to find a fleet operator or company car driver without a smartphone. If you are one, contact us and let us know how you do it, because we love old-fashioned stories. But for everyone, mobile devices and their associated applications have mushroomed across the globe and are equally ubiquitous in the fleet business.
Many have replaced administrative tasks previously confined to spreadsheets or physical pieces of paper – a boon in the age of the pandemic – making it a faster and often more reliable and compliant way to tackle problems. vehicle checks and mileage capture, or just paying for everyday sundries like parking.
Here, we take a look at ten of the most valuable and versatile mobile apps available today for business car operators and drivers. The criterion for the applications we have chosen is that they must be free or cheap, accessible to everyone (such as those reserved for customers of a particular company that have not succeeded) and provide a service that is genuinely useful to the customer. modern fleet industry. .
Friend of the accident
Price: To free
A handy little app to support distressed drivers throughout the post-collision process. The Accident Buddy “Report Incident” feature includes a form that tells the user exactly what information to collect about themselves, their vehicle and others following a shunt. It includes functions to illustrate whether the vehicle is still roadworthy, where the damage is, perceived faults, weather conditions and a function to report injuries, while the video and photo facilities help to make the report more accurate and to reduce the unpleasant ‘he said, she said’ insurance claims business.
The developer also offers white label services to the fleet and insurance industry. Therefore, if you already have such an app through something like an insurer or leasing company, you might already be using it.
Caura
Price: To free
If your drivers are traveling anywhere near part of the road network with additional charges, it may be worth downloading Caura, which makes it easier to pay for tolls, traffic jams or clean air zone charges. and parking through a single app, while Gray Fleet drivers could also benefit from the ability to request roadworthiness, road tax, and insurance – as well as notifications on everyone’s due date. Drivers enter their vehicle registration number and the app displays a range of details, including renewal dates and options to remotely pay the aforementioned fees through online payment services.
Citymapper
Price: To free; in-app purchases between £ 2.99 and £ 99.99
Driving in a big city is usually not a lot of fun, and unless your fleet only includes vehicles that avoid the clean air zone fee, it can be expensive too. Parking on the outskirts of town and taking public transport is often a good way to get around this – for reasons of cost, time, and the environment – and Citymapper helps users navigate it. It directs them to the most suitable type of transport (train, metro, bus, etc.) and provides what it claims to be very precise routes and timetables. A total of 50 million international users and a slew of Google Play rewards suggest the developers are on to something, and it also offers the Citymapper Pass travel card, which allows users to pay for different types of public and private transport. , although, according to its website, the card is currently limited to London.
Fleetcheck pilot
Price: £ 2 per vehicle per month
Vehicle inspection apps are all the rage, but you often have to be an existing customer of something like software or a fleet management company to access them. Yes, this is a paid service, but the Fleetcheck Driver app is available for all fleets of any size and has a customizable DVSA-approved control system to ensure that drivers give their vehicles the best possible ride. checking necessary before hitting the road and catching any problems beforehand.
It has exceeded ten million checks this year, which the company’s chief executive Peter Golding attributes to a growing desire for paperless inspections both for convenience and from a biosecurity perspective. in the midst of the pandemic.
“Covid has made people realize that if they were dependent on a paper method of communication with an office or elsewhere nowadays it really needs to be removed. We are seeing much higher adoption of the app than ever before. , and much of that growth has occurred over the past 18 months. “
HMRC
Price: To free
It’s certainly not the flashiest app in our pick, but HMRC’s offering is useful for employees who need to get their hands on fundamental tax information, such as insurance codes and numbers. national, and also allows them to calculate their net pay after income tax. and NI deductions. Other features include details on potential income and benefits, as well as facilities to track forms and letters, edit personal information, and, for those who have overpaid, request refunds. Unfortunately, that doesn’t go as far as the company car tax, and to our knowledge there isn’t a dedicated app to perform such a function, at least on the Google Play Store (but there are some websites that do). HMRC’s offer is nonetheless convenient for tax bases, however.
Ringgo
Price: Free personal account; £ 1.99 per month per user for business
Ringgo bills itself as the UK’s number one parking app, which is probably fair enough considering it’s been downloaded over a million times from Google Play alone. It allows users to search for different types of parking spaces nearby, reserve and pay for them remotely – convenient for company car types on the move and looking for a space. It is also possible to pay for extra time in a parking lot via the app without having to physically come back and hastily put coins into the meter. An individual plan for up to five vehicles is free, while business accounts for more vehicles and users cost £ 1.99 per user per month.
Smart dash camera
Price: To free; in-app purchases £ 1.79 – £ 8.99
It is not the only dashcam app, but Smart Dash Cam is one of the most popular. It does what it says on the box; Stick your phone to the dashboard after downloading (a solid phone holder is a good idea) and you’ve instantly converted it into a makeshift recording device.
If you are an Android user, Droid Dashcam is also worth a visit. It has fewer downloads than the aforementioned offering, but users rate it higher than Smart Dash Cam – 4.4 vs. 3.7 stars on the Play Store.
We’re not hitting non-phone systems now, as they’re likely to be more complete, especially when paired with a dedicated telematics setup. However, if your fleet doesn’t have the funds for such installations – and, most importantly, assuming it’s suitable for your vehicles and drivers – a plug-and-play dashcam on an app is a much cheaper way and easier to record hard evidence in the event of an incident, and extremely useful for insurance claims.
Vehicle Log Tracker
Price: To free; in-app purchases £ 1.79 to £ 3.09
If the stellar Play Store reviews are anything to go by, this is the best of a huge collection of mileage capture apps. Basically, this is a fairly straightforward GPS recording job, but reports are generated for commercial drivers taking tax returns into account. Users can track multiple vehicles, save frequent destinations, and if set up correctly, it would be able to distinguish between train and car trips, which means you can avoid spurious trip entries. Well worth the nominal cost of downloading the reports if you plan to use it regularly.
Waze
Price: To free
If you’ve just picked up a premium executive lounge with a professional navigation pack (and it’s running the latest version), look away now. For everyone else, Waze is one of the go-to navigation apps. While smartphone makers probably claim the opposite, Waze generally trumps standard smartphone mapping installations because its users submit real-time traffic updates. With no comprehensive, independent real-world road test of large routing applications, it is believed to be the most accurate and reliable of the bunch, especially when it comes to ” inform drivers of impending traffic jams.
Zap Map
Price: To free; in-app purchases £ 4.99-47.99
An obvious choice but, in the era of 1% BIK for electric cars and a massive push for them more generally, a choice that is becoming more and more relevant for fleets. The Zap Map app (excuse the rhyme) shows a full view of the UK charging network and offers a filter function to reduce chargers through a series of variables including connection types (CSS, CHAdeMO, Type 2, etc.), networks and payment methods. , among other things, which is particularly practical, given the convoluted nature of public pricing. It also includes information about each charging station, including the number of connections it has, its availability and the date of its last use. The route planner allows users to sketch out journeys with convenient built-in charging points and the Zap Pay feature provides a way to pay the charges themselves.
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