2019 Honda Civic

Idle fleet vehicles draining money, drivers taking hour-long detours to lunch, traffic jams derailing schedules, maintenance issues snowballing into bills with multiple zeros… If you’re nodding along to these fleet management issues, you’re not alone.

What does it take to develop a fleet management budget that will support you on the way to your business goals? In this short guide will cover the determining aspects you should keep in mind and strategies to employ when drawing up a fleet budget. But first, let’s clarify — why is it imperative to have one? 🤔

Most "fleet management software" was built for long-haul trucking or service vehicles — construction is the asset-mixed reality in between, and most vendors treat it as an afterthought. Here are the four capabilities that actually matter for a construction fleet, starting with dispatch, plus an honest vendor-by-vendor look at how Samsara, Motive, Fleetio, Verizon Connect, Tenna, and Fleet Chaser handle each.

Unexpected downtime presents a tangible setback for your fleet. Not only is your asset now off the road, but you have to tweak your operations and allocate finances to accommodate for it.

Imagine it’s a Monday morning, and your fleet of 100 construction vehicles is ready to hit the road. You’ve got a bunch of active job orders, and one of them is pretty critical: your concrete mixer truck needs to be at a construction site by 8 a.m. sharp.

With simplified Global Search, every team member who will be interacting with the software will save valuable time — and, in the long run, all those shortcuts add up, enabling you to focus longer on making crucial decisions for business prosperity, rather than just managing operations.

As of December 2024, there are 968 fleet management software (FMS) options listed on Capterra alone. Think of going through dozens of them, hoping to find the perfect fit for your fleet. You spend days, maybe weeks, swamped by endless features and specs, sitting through overhyped demos, and feeling your brain turn to mush.

A construction dispatcher fields the same four calls all day — where are you, did you finish, when's the truck coming, which site. None are emergencies, but together they burn about two hours. Here's where the time goes — and the first call to move off the phone.

Setting up a real job takes a few minutes — a route, products, a crew, a schedule. Get interrupted halfway and that half-built task used to be gone. Drafts fix that: while you build a task, Fleet Chaser saves it automatically, so you can step away and pick up exactly where you left off. A draft stays private and silent — no task number, no notifications — until you press Create task.