PoolCar – Car & Asset Booking Solutio

PoolCar started with a blank page…

Every function and feature in the PoolCar online booking system exists because a fleet manager or financial officer suggested something to solve a problem, save costs, streamline administration or improve some aspect of their shared fleet. How can we help your organization?

• Capture travel requests and journey plans
• Identify under-utilized assets
• Standardize processes and controls
• Encourage car pooling and other modes of transport
• Improve accountability
• Delegate responsibility to departmental heads
• Effortlessly capture metrics
• Change behaviors and align with policy
• Manage physical access to keys
• Charge-back hire charges to driver cost centres

Standardize the Booking Process

The online booking calendar is updated in real time and provides a simple, easy to use system that can be accessed from a web browser, smartphone or tablet. Search for available cars by motor pool location, chassis type, transmission and accessories such as winches and tow-bars.

Customize the booking form to capture Fringe Benefits Tax (FBT) data, cost center codes, project codes and custom fields.

Use Check Out/In to Capture Actuals

Bookings are the reservation for a vehicle. We can also capture when the car was actually taken and returned with the Check Out/In feature. When a car is Checked Out, the color of the booking changes to show it as ‘in progress’. Automatically cancel bookings that have not been checked out within a certain amount of time.

On Check In, capture vital data from the driver such as the parking location, overnight garaging, fuel level and if there is any damage that needs looking at.

Booking data then flows through to the Log Book report, which means you can eliminate paper log books once and for all.

Calculate Hire Charges

Use the Charge Out rates to set a fee for each booking based on your choice of time, distance and a host of other variables. Many customers run their internal shared vehicle fleet as cost neutral or break-even, relying on the Charge Out function to levy fees between different cost center budgets.

Export charges to Excel, or ask about our integration services to connect charges to your General Ledger or finance system, such as Oracle, SAP or Xero.

Driver Vetting and Policy Compliance

The Driver Register is your centralized master list of all drivers. By capturing license expiry dates, drivers can be automatically alerted when their license is coming up for renewal. Nominate which vehicles drivers can operate by specifying their license class or transmission type. Restrict access to asset classes that require specialised training, such as 4WD safety on unsealed roads or having completed a training course on electric bikes.

Many customers use the implementation of the PoolCar system as the opportunity to update an existing, or introduce a new organizational-wide vehicle usage policy. All drivers must sign on to your policy before they can book fleet vehicles.

FBT Reporting

For customers in Australia and New Zealand, PoolCar can simplify their Fringe Benefits Tax (FBT) compliance with the built-in FBT Report. Currently supporting the Statutory method for calculating FBT, the FBT Report shows every booking where there is an overnight garaging component using either the Check Out/In times or the booking times.

If PoolCar is linked to a GPS Telematics solution, whether our in-house GPS trackers or those from a partner, the FBT Report will also show the position of the vehicle as at midnight.

Combined with the Log Book report, the FBT Report will significantly save administration time.

Measure Utilization and Optimize Fleet Size/Mix

PoolCar is all about who, when and why your fleet vehicles are used. Significant cost savings can be achieved by truly understanding the utilization picture and disposing of under-utilized assets. PoolCar provides you with detailed data and reports to fully optimize your fleet size and mix against operational requirements. Here’s a worked example:

• Assumed average annual running cost per vehicle = $8,000 p.a.
• 100 vehicle fleet = $800,000 expenditure per year
• 10% fleet reduction = 10 cars
• Annual savings = $80,000 per year, recurring.

In reducing fleet size, the challenge is to enable the day-to-day operations to continue without impact albeit with fewer cars. The challenge is essentially one of balancing supply versus demand. The PoolCar technologies make sharing cars more efficient, with features like approval triggers, intra-agency sharing, general broad pools versus departmental fleet silos and automatic cancellation of ‘no shows’ – bookings that are made by staff just in case and the car doesn’t actually move.

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Intra-Agency Sharing

Perhaps the biggest trend we are currently seeing is from organizations who wish to combine agency or departmental fleets into large, singular shared pools. The benefit of doing so is that the utilization rate of smaller silo fleets is often lower, as the demand fluctuates with that department’s workload and operational requirements. By combing smaller silo fleets into one large pool we smooth out these fluctuations across all business units, affording the organization to run a smaller overall fleet size with higher utilization rates.

Where business units are across different organizations, such as different government agencies co-located in the same or building or precinct, vehicles can be combined into intra-agency pools allowing staff from one agency being able to book vehicles owned by another agency. PoolCar makes this possible and can produce intra-agency charging data to account for usage and cost sharing.

Journey Planner

So far in the utilization challenge we have focused on supply – reducing fleet size. What about reducing demand, or in other words, avoiding the need for booking a car in the first place? The Journey Planner is a new feature from PoolCar that does just that. Instead of directly booking a car, the user is required to log their intended journey, nominating an origin and destination location. PoolCar then suggests all modes of transport that comply with your policy. For instance, a mode of transport may be walking but a 2 hour walk doesn’t make sense and consequently the rules based policy engine eliminates this as a possible mode of transport.

Other modes of transport include bicycle, public transit, being a passenger in someone else’s car booking, booking a ride-share service or booking a car. Thanks to integrated maps, the PoolCar Journey Planner can route the journey and provide directions.

For safety, PoolCar can be configured to ensure that staff check in at each way point to record that they have arrived, with automated welfare check notifications being sent to nominated team leaders if the driver has not checked in at a way point within a certain period of time, with configurable escalation paths to other team members.

Advanced Capabilities

PoolCar is a very flexible and feature rich booking platform. The culmination of eight years of research and development, talking with fleet operators across 13 countries has exposed our software engineering team to just about every imaginable scenario when it comes to shared corporate vehicles. Here’s a glimpse of some advanced features, keeping in mind this is not the complete list! 

• Self-Serve – users book vehicles themselves, resulting in significant administration savings if you currently have a gatekeeper or manual process.
• Approval Triggers – automate an email-based approval workflow for bookings that meet rule-based criteria, such as overnight bookings.
• Access Groups  – partition vehicles into separate pools and control access to which departments or cost centers can book those assets.
• Buffers – build in a mandatory buffer of, say, 15 minutes to the end of each booking to minimise disruptions should the driver be running late.
• Custom Booking Fields – capture all the data you need by adding custom fields to the booking form.
• In/Out Board – At-a-Glance view of the entire fleet, which cars are in and when the out cars are due back.
• Automatically cancel ‘no shows’ – cars that are not checked out within a certain time frame can be automatically cancelled, freeing up the vehicle for other staff.
• Late Return alerts – send alerts to the administrators when a car is overdue, so that the adjacent booking holder is not inconvenienced.
• Outlook Calendar Integration – each confirmed booking has an email receipt with a calendar attachment.
• Drag-n-Drop – car damaged or custodian called in sick? No need to cancel and re-book, simply drag and drop the booking onto another car.
• Passenger Manifest – encourage car pooling by inviting colleagues to be a passenger in your booking.
• New Zealand – Warrant of Fitness (WoF) and Road User Charges (RUC).
• Key Management – PoolCar is fully integrated with the electronic key cabinet and the keyless entry device.
• Telematics – Booking data can be integrated with GPS Telematics systems to see where the car is parked and import trip data for reporting.
• Customizable Templates – Modify the standard wording to suit your organization for email alerts and notifications.
• Auditing and Logging – full event-based auditing of what users are doing in the system.
• Accreditation – limit access to specialised equipment that requires the user to have received training or attained an accreditation.
• Utilization Balancing – automatically sort vehicles by lowest utilization, environmental friendliness or manual ranking.
• Reports – powerful reporting where data can be displayed in live charts and graphs, or export data to Excel for further analysis.
• Fleet Management – integrated modules for fleet management, maintenance, servicing and more.
• Powerful Data Integration – import data from existing systems such as HR and Finance. Experience includes Oracle, SAP and Peoplesoft.
• Single Sign On – PoolCar can be integated with standard SSO options such as ADFS, AzureAD and SAML.
• Secure – all data can be encrypted in transit and at rest. All nightly database backups are encrypted with daily vulnerability scanning using industry leading tools.
• Cloud Hosting or On-Premise – all cloud servers are hosted with the world’s no. 1 managed cloud provider, RackSpace.
• Support Level Agreement (SLA) – backed by our support team with automated monitoring of service level performance and response times.
• ..And lots more .. if there is a specific feature you require please ask!