Better online reporting about vehicle rental activity is being sought by fleets who are aiming to drive down costs through improving visibility over hire activity.

Motor industry e-commerce specialist Epyx says that there is pressure on providers of short term rental platforms to provide accurate, relevant information in easily understandable formats.

Marc Lees, business development manager at Epyx said: “Fleets providing vehicle rental are increasingly keen to ensure that they can make quick and informed decisions over their rental. To do this, they are increasingly looking at real-time online reporting.

“This is an important area of fleet management. Almost every fleet manager can tell you about expensive instances where drivers have unnecessarily retained hire vehicles long after repairs to their own company cars had been completed.

“Equally, rental vehicles simply sometimes sit on the company car park because whoever is responsible for ending the rental has forgotten that they are on hire and this again can cause large and unnecessary bills.

“Issues of this type can often be solved through better IT, with reports, dashboards and alerts that enable managers to easily see which vehicles are on hire.

“Meeting this need is a challenge for providers of daily rental systems.”

Lees added that the next version of Epyx’s 1link Hire Network, releasing in the coming weeks, would have a revised range of reporting options designed to help fleet customers take greater control.

He said: “Providing reporting that really delivers is a matter of creating the right processes, options and designs, so that users get exactly the information they need when they need it and in a format that makes the best sense to them.

“This is especially relevant to the increasing number of people who are accessing platforms like 1link Hire Network through smartphones and tablets.

“Creating reports that work on smaller screens is something to which we have paid detailed attention in the forthcoming version of the product.”

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